Goa seeks 4 more more months to ready coastal plan

Panaji: The state government on Friday approached the National Green Tribunal (NGT) and sought four more months to complete the Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP), senior officer said.
In September, NGT granted Goa time till November 15 to finalise and submit the plan to the Union ministry of environment forest and climate change (MoEFCC).
Since Goa is the only state that has failed to finalise its CZMP, the NGT had warned that action would be taken against the state’s government officers if the new deadline is not met.The earlier deadline to submit the coastal plan was August 31.
The state had submitted the plan to the Chennai-based National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM) for their comments, but they were yet to return it.
Recently, environment minister Nilesh Cabral wrote to Union environment minster Prakash Javadekar seeking his intervention to amend the Coastal Regulation Zone notification to complete the draft CZMP plan. However, Cabral is yet to get an appointment.
Cabral said they had no option but to ask NGT for more time as NCSCM sought more time to prepare the plans. As a result of the CZMP not being finalised, there are 529 small and big projects pending with CRZ Goa, Cabral said.