PESHAWAR: Thousands look to SC for justice in forest royalty case
By Waseem Ahmad Shah
PESHAWAR, July 29: Thousands of people in Kalam and Dir-Kohistan have been looking to the Supreme Court for deciding the longstanding issue of forest royalty.
The appeals filed by the Forest Development Corporation (FDC) against the judgment of the Peshawar High Court on the issue had been pending before the apex court for the last three years.
The apex court in 2004 had stayed the disbursement of arrears on account of forest royalty and since then there had been no proceedings.Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry had taken note of the issue and even fixed the case for hearing, but in the aftermath of the presidential reference filed against him the case could not be decided, it is learnt.
“With the reinstatement of Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry our hopes have rekindled and we expect that he would decide the case at the earliest,” a stakeholder, Fazlur Rehman, said.
He said most of the people in the area had been praying for the reinstatement of the chief justice since March 9 as they believed that he was their only hope against influential forest contractors and members of the timber mafia.
The stakeholders had disputed the mode of forest royalty payments on the grounds that the government had been paying them on the basis of pre-fixed rates whereas the relevant law provided that the same should be paid through net sale proceeds of the timber.
They claimed that their contracts with the FDC had lapsed in 1983.
The legal wrangling on the matter had been raging on for more than 12 years now. In April 1996, a two-member bench of the high court headed by Justice J.D. Akberjee had disposed of two petitions filed by right-holders of Kalam (Swat district) and Dir-Kohistan areas. The court had directed the government to act in accordance with the Forest Act of 1927 and the NWFP Management of Protected Forests Rules, 1975 and distribute the sale proceeds among the local people in accordance with the procedure provided in the Act and Rules framed there under.
However, the FDC filed appeals before the Supreme Court stating that the provisions of Order 1, Rule 8 of the Civil Procedure Code were not followed strictly as applicable to the proceedings in the constitutional jurisdiction by the high court. The apex court had remanded the cases back to the high court in 1998 directing it to follow the provision of Order 1, Rule 8 of the CPC and publish advertisements informing the concerned stakeholders about the case.
Although the apex court had directed the high court to decide the petitions within six months but the case continued on for many years and finally the high court disposed of the three petitions on June 18, 2004.
A two-member bench of the high court comprising Justice Shahjehan Khan Yousafzai and Justice Qazi Ahsanullah Qureshi had observed that the petitioners were entitled for relief as prayed for in their writ petitions. The petitions had been filed by Mutabar Khan, Mamraiz Khan and Gujar Khan.
The issue had been the root cause of various disputes in these areas. Long marches were organised and hunger-strike camps were set up from time to time urging the government to give them their due rights.
The FDC claimed that after the expiry of the relevant agreement in 1983, the right-holders had again entered into an agreement with them under the same terms and conditions which provided provision of royalty on the basis of pre-fixed rates and not net sale proceeds of timber. The people denied the claim.
