Overview
- A division bench of Justices Manoj Kumar Tiwari and Subhash Upadhyay issued notices to the CBI, the Union government, and the Uttarakhand government, while also making the Survey of India and the Supreme Court’s CEC parties to the case.
- The court described the large-scale disappearance in the ecologically sensitive Mussoorie region as a very serious issue and sought counter-affidavits from all respondents.
- The PIL alleges that the removal of markers enabled encroachment and illegal construction and claims a nexus involving forest officials, political interests, and land mafias, with assertions of unusual wealth accumulation by territorial officers.
- Petitions seek a geo-referenced resurvey by the Survey of India, digitisation of forest land records, transfer of relevant land from Revenue to the Forest Department, and an ecological restoration and reclamation plan.
- The issue surfaced during working-plan verification, with a DFO report confirming widespread losses concentrated in the Mussoorie and Raipur ranges, while internal moves to re-examine the findings and the transfer of officer Sanjiv Chaturvedi have drawn scrutiny.