About 1,040 forests, including 24 in the Mysuru territorial division under section 17 of Karnataka Forest Act, will be declared as 'reserve forests'. With this, the territorial division of Mysuru will get an additional 4,915.2 hectares of reserve forest area. Environmentalists said that after much delay, declaring more forests as reserve forests is a good step to protect wildlife. Just declaring them as reserve forests won't help, unless civil society is ever attentive along with the forest department, to prevent any encroachments.
DCF Mysuru division, K N Basavaraju said that the district currently has 10 forest blocks spread over 3,447.20 hectares, with just three reserve forests spread over 2306.54 hectares and seven social forests spread over 1,140.66 hectares. In Karnataka, there are around 1040 forests notified under section 4 of the KF Act 1963 for over 60 years. According to the Supreme Court’s order, the State Government appointed ten retired AC rank officers as FSOs three years ago and they have issued proclamations under section 5 of KF Act for each of these notified forest areas and given the required time. They are redressing people’s grievances. People too have approached KAT (Karnataka State Administrative Tribunal). In many cases, encroachments are supposed to be cleared.