Supreme Court Rejects Plea to Revoke Forest Land Restoration Orders

The Supreme Court of India has refused to reconsider its earlier directive requiring all states and union territories to form special investigation teams (SITs) to identify and restore illegally diverted forest land to reserved forest status. On August 18, a five-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant dismissed a curative petition filed by the Richie Rich Cooperative Housing Society (RRCHS), which had challenged a May 15, 2025 Supreme Court ruling in the same matter.

The original judgment had set aside the society’s claim to 11.89 hectares of land within a reserved forest area in Kondhwa Budruk village, Pune, Maharashtra, originally allotted in 1999. The top court’s May 2025 ruling had prompted nationwide directives for chief secretaries and administrators to establish SITs within one year to investigate whether reserved forest land had been illegally transferred to private entities and to either restore such land to forest departments or recover its cost for forest development.

The curative bench, also comprising Justices Vikram Nath, BV Nagarathna, Augustine George Masih, and K Vinod Chandran, concluded that the grounds for reopening the case did not meet the legal threshold established in the 2002 case Rupa Ashok Hurra vs. Ashok Hurra. The bench emphasized that the May 2025 verdict had already exposed systemic irregularities, including the alleged involvement of then Maharashtra Revenue Minister and senior bureaucrats in bypassing the Forest Conservation Act to allot forest land to RRCHS.

The Supreme Court’s May 15, 2025 judgment had highlighted how objections from officials about the land’s agricultural status were ignored and how a 1996 ruling in the landmark T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad case—defining forests expansively under the Forest Conservation Act—was disregarded. The top court had termed the case “a classic example of how politicians, bureaucrats, and builders collude to convert forest land for commercial use under the pretext of resettling marginalized communities.”

The May verdict had also quashed an environmental clearance granted by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in 2007 to RRCHS and ordered the handover of the land to the forest department within three months. The curative petition, initially filed after a review plea was dismissed in August 2025, was later pursued by senior advocate Dama Sesadari Naidu.

States and UTs were directed to complete the identification and restoration process within one year, with provisions to recover land value from private entities if restoration was not feasible, and to use recovered funds for forest development.

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