New Delhi: The Uttarakhand government Wednesday defended an Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer, who is facing disciplinary proceedings for alleged illegal felling of 6,000 trees and construction at the Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR), in the Supreme Court.
Calling him an honest officer, senior advocate A.N.S. Nadkarni contended before a two-judge bench led by Justice B.R. Gavai that IFS officer Rahul, as the director of CTR, had written letters informing his seniors about unauthorised construction in the forest area and ordered their demolition.
Saying so, Nadkarni tried to justify Rahul’s now-scrapped appointment by the government as head of Rajaji National Park. He also claimed that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is investigating the matter, has, so far, found nothing incriminating against Rahul.
However, documents accessed and reviewed by ThePrint revealed otherwise. Multiple inquiries, including one by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF), have held Rahul responsible for alleged illegal activity inside the forest area.
As director of CTR, Rahul, the reports have held, failed to prevent the unauthorised axing of trees and the subsequent construction in the prohibited zone of the forest.
An investigation by a retired IFS officer Jyotsana Sitling in March last year made a startling disclosure regarding letters that Rahul claimed to have written to the head of forest force (HOFF) and the chief wildlife warden (CWW) of Uttarakhand, informing them about the illegal activities. Sitling, in her inquiry, established that the letters never reached the two senior officers and insinuated that Rahul’s office backdated the letters in records.
Sitling prepared her report, which runs into 1,200 pages, following an in-depth inquiry into the illegal activities in the CTR by a former forest officer, who acted as the inquiry officer in the disciplinary proceedings against former CWW J.S. Suhag after his identification as a key violator in the illegal felling of trees.
During her probe, Sitling studied the procedure followed to dispatch the official letters and concluded that the communique between July and October 2021 from Rahul’s office never reached either the HOFF or the CWW.
According to the former CTR director, he wrote eight letters to the two senior officers.
Nadkarni’s submission, favouring Rahul, was a response to an objection to the IFS officer’s new posting by the top court-appointed Central Empowered Committee (CEC) for forest-related matters. In a report to the top court, the CEC red-flagged Rahul’s appointment as Rajaji National Park director in the backdrop of the CBI probe against him.
In September 2023, the Uttarakhand High Court ordered the CBI probe into alleged violations reported in the CTR. In March this year, the Supreme Court pulled up the Uttarakhand government for the tree felling and illegal construction in the CTR, calling it a “classic case” of nexus between politicians and government officials to ransack the environment for short-term commercial gains.
The CEC report noted that recently, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami cleared Rahul’s appointment, overruling objections of the state forest minister and the principal secretary, both of whom did not want the officer in the backdrop of the pending CBI probe.
The CEC report came after a complaint by Dehradun-based Anu Pant via advocate Abhijay Negi. Earlier, a PIL by Pant had led to the Uttarakhand HC ordering the CBI probe into the Corbett matter.
Though the Uttarakhand government transferred Rahul out of Rajaji to another department Wednesday, hours before the top court heard the matter, the state also backed its officer in court, saying he “is a good officer” and that he cannot be sacrificed. That prompted the bench led by Justice B.R. Gavai to remark: “Unless he is exonerated in the departmental proceedings, you cannot give him a certificate of good conduct.”
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‘Backdated letters’
With the CBI now, Sitling’s report said that out of the eight letters that Rahul claimed to have written, the HOFF or the CWW received none. ThePrint has accessed the report.
The inquiry officer in the disciplinary proceedings against Suhag had taken into account the findings of Sitling’s inspection of the registers maintaining a record of official communications.
The F-7 index register kept at the HOFF and CWW offices did not contain entries of any of the eight letters. On inspecting the F-6 register at Rahul’s office in Corbett, Sitling found records of only three of the eight letters purportedly written by the officer. These records, however, were entered in the absence of the chief assistant and senior assistant clerks responsible for maintaining the register, the two clerks told Sitling during her investigation.
Moreover, Sitling found that the register recorded the dispatch date of one of these three letters as 19 July 2021 — a day when Rahul was not in Corbett but in Delhi to attend a meeting of the Central Zoo Authority.
Her probe also found that the register seemed to have backdated another letter, with the dispatch date coinciding with when the Uttarakhand HC began hearing the Corbett matter.
In the case of the third letter, there was a discrepancy in the dispatch date, with one register recording it as 27 August 2021 and another as 2 September 2021.
While there were three email versions of the letters in the sent box of Rahul’s official email account, Sitling’s report said she found none of them in the inboxes of the email accounts of the two senior officers. Sitling checked their accounts on 17 March 2023.
Besides, the Uttarakhand government’s inquiry into Rahul’s role held him responsible for the violations detected in all 12 works in Corbett. Kapil Joshi, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forest, Uttarakhand, wrote the report that indicted him.
Prepared by C.P. Goyal, the then Director General of Forests, the MoEF report concluded that Rahul did not take adequate measures to stop the construction of illegal structures in Corbett.
Prepared at the request of the state’s finance department, a 71-page report from July 2023 on the alleged irregularities in CTR by Uttarakhand government’s principal accountant general of audit also contained adverse comments against Rahul. This report discussed how there had been ex-post-facto approval for the expenditure on illegal works in CTR. The scrutiny of the records of the director of CTR revealed that he allegedly transferred funds from one Working of Tiger Foundation for works in two ranges falling in CTR but made no entry in the cash book about this transfer and did not mention any refund of this loan against payments from the foundation’s fund.
The audit report also presented a case study of the alleged violations reported during Rahul’s directorship of CTR. It gave the history of how a hut was allegedly constructed illegally in the Dhikala complex of Corbett.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)