Panaji: Goa’s private forest review committee has completed the scrutiny of 3,215 of 3,349 survey numbers under review, identifying 848 hectares as private forest, according to its 13th part final report submitted up to May 2026.The latest report reviewed 83 survey numbers since the 12th part final report was approved by state govt, adding 267.4 hectares to the private forest category. With just 65 survey numbers left to be examined, the process of ground verification, enumeration and surveys is nearing completion.The survey numbers under review were provisionally identified by the committees headed by retired forest officers VT Thomas and FX Araujo, which worked between 2012 and 2017 to identify private forest areas not covered by the earlier Sawant and Karapurkar committee reports.Goa’s criteria for identifying private forests, followed by all committees since the Sawant committee was constituted in 1997, require that at least 75% of the tree composition comprise forestry species. The land must either be contiguous with govt forest or, if isolated, measure at least five hectares. The canopy density must also not be less than 0.4.Of the 130 survey numbers across 39 villages identified as private forests by the Sawant and Karapurkar committees and found to be partly or fully repeated in the Thomas and Araujo committees’ reports, 21 survey numbers are yet to be reviewed.Another six survey numbers identified as private forests adjoining those mapped by the Sawant and Karapurkar committees and found partly repeated in the Thomas and Araujo reports, also remain pending review.A further 35 survey numbers, which were provisionally identified and later excluded by the Thomas and Araujo committees, are awaiting scrutiny by the review committee. One survey number classified as govtforest but listed as private forest by the Thomas and Araujo committees is also yet to be examined.The review committee was first constituted in 2018 as a nine-member panel to examine grievances raised by landowners and environmentalists over both the inclusion and exclusion of survey numbers as private forests. In July 2019, chief minister Pramod Sawant said complaints continued regarding the inclusion of private properties as private forests. A fresh review committee was constituted in Jan 2020 to re-examine the findings of the Thomas and Araujo panels.Separately, two additional private forest survey numbers were identified in Loliem, Canacona, in the committee’s ninth part final report.
