Kendrapada: Forest officials on Saturday started demolition of illegal shrimp farms at Pataparia, Vekta, Gopaljewpatana, Sailendranarayanpur and Gumura villages at Bhitarkanika National Park in Kendrapada district.Officials, under police protection, demolished gherries, covering an area of 12 acres of shrimp farms, on Saturday. “We will demolish all shrimp farms which violate the Coastal Regulation Zone and the rulings of the Supreme Court and the Orissa high court,” Manas Kumar Das, assistant conservator of forest of Bhitarkanika, said.“We ran earth-movers over the illegal farms in the villages for which security was tightened in the area. The forest department will plant mangrove saplings on the dismantled prawn farms to convert the area into a mangrove forest,” Das added. “The owners of these farms also dump the effluents of their gherries into the nearby rivers and ponds. They also pollute the groundwater sources in the villages. Illegal prawn farms also pose a direct threat to the nearby rich mangrove forests. Recently many villagers of these areas blamed the mushrooming of illegal prawn farms and its effluents for destroying their fertile agricultural lands, following which, we took stern action against the shrimp farm owners,” Das said. “Many seaside and riverside villages in the district are up- in- arms against the mushrooming of illegal shrimp farms in the villages as unchecked growth of shrimp farms had rendered their fertile farm lands due to the release of the untreated effluents from the farms into the nearby agriculture lands,” Umesh Chandra Singh, a farmers’ leader in Kendrapada, said.But many shrimp farmers expressed their displeasure over the authorities’ action. “Paddy cultivation is not a profit-making business in the seaside villages for which we converted our lands into shrimp farms and the officials have no right to take any action against us,” Narayan Mandal, a shrimp farm owner of Pataparia village, said.Many shrimp mafias have been illegally converting large tracts of mangrove forests and agricultural land into prawn farms since the 1990s and as a result forest cover has been shrinking. In 2017, the Union ministry of environment and forests declared 192 villages around Bhitarkanika as eco-sensitive zones (ESZs) to prevent ecological damage caused due to developmental activities around the park, which is known as India’s second largest mangrove forest. ESZ prohibits any shrimp farming within 2km from Bhitarkanika,” environmentalist and secretary of Gahirmatha Marine Turtle and Mangrove Conservation Society, Hemant Kumar Rout, said.
