The Karnataka High Court directed the Government on Tuesday to release rewards promised to forest department officials who were part of the Special Task Force (STF) constituted for hunting down forest brigand Veerappan.Justice Sachin Shankar Magadum allowed petitions filed by Srinivasa and 71 others and directed the release of rewards as per the government order dated July 8, 2005.As per the 2005 resolution, the people who served more than three years are entitled to cash prizes of Rs 3 lakh and a vacant site. The people who served more than two years but less than three years are entitled to cash prizes of Rs 2 lakh and a vacant site, and the people who served more than one year but less than two years are entitled to cash prizes of Rs 1 lakh and a vacant site. The people who served less than a year are entitled to cash prizes of Rs 50, 000 and a vacant site.Advocate B S Nagaraj, appearing for the petitioners, questioned the delay in releasing the rewards.“Petitioners before the court are senior citizens, some of the petitioners/officials have even died, and their legal representatives are before the court seeking their rightful dues. These forest department employees discharged their service at the cost of their lives, and they helped and assisted the police people who were in the STF, for eliminating the forest brigand Veerappan,” he submitted.The petition claimed that police personnel in the Karnataka and Tamil Nadu STF had already availed of the rewards. However, the petitioners, who belong to the forest department, have been running from pillar to post for the last 20 years to get the benefits, it said.“The same is a clear violation of Article 14,” the plea read.Story continues below this adTill now, 96 forest department officials have approached the court. In 2024, the court allowed a petition filed by 24 people. Most petitioners held posts of drivers, watchers, forest guards, or deputy conservators of forest and reportedly helped the STF traverse the dense forest or passed information about Veerappan’s hideouts.Following the court order in 2024, the Government has released the rewards for 12 petitioners. The other petitioners filed a contempt petition before the high court making Chief Secretary Dr Shalini Rajneesh an accused for disobeying the court order.During the hearing of the contempt petition on April 6, the court was informed that the Government had filed a review petition against the 2024 order that directed the release of the rewards to the petitioners.The Veerappan huntVeerappan, who operated in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala for more than two decades, is said to have poached over 200 elephants, smuggled ivory and sandalwood worth hundreds of crores of rupees and is alleged to have killed more than 180 people, mostly police and forest officials.Story continues below this adAn STF comprising police and forest department personnel was constituted to nab him. The brigand was gunned down on October 8, 2004, following which the DGP made a proposal to the Government to give prizes to people who had discharged their duties in the departments of police and forest and helped eliminate Veerappan.The Government thus issued an order dated July 8, 2005, to pay cash prizes to people who had worked in the STF.As no benefits were awarded to forest officials and the Government was not considering several representations positively, 32 petitioners, all forest officials, approached the court in 2015 to seek a direction for the Government to release the rewards.In an order on January 27, 2015, the high court directed the Government to consider the representations.Story continues below this adThe forest department then sent a list of 259 people stated to have assisted the STF in hunting down Veerappan from 1993. However, the Government decided to reward only six people who claimed they were part of the STF on the day when Veerappana was killed.Advocate Nagaraj said, “This selective selection of only six people and rewarding them was challenged by us on the grounds of being arbitrary and discriminatory.”He further submitted that the high court held in 2024 that the Government, being a model employer, was bound to stick to its promise to reward the forest department staff who were part of the STF.In the 2024 order, the court held, “It is known the world over that Mr Veerappan was not gunned down in a day, but it took several lives and several years, and several persons had risked their lives in providing information about Mr Veerappan from time to time. The State could have either rewarded all who were involved in hunting down Veerappan or not at all. It could not have trivialised the effort and courage of all those who were killed or who had survived the onslaught of the brigand by restricting the reward to only a handful.”Story continues below this adThe court said that restricting the rewards to a few people showed “the insensitivity of the State Government”.“Therefore, to grant the reward to only persons who were part of the STF on 18.10.2004 does not stand to reason but is indeed an act of discrimination. Therefore, the impugned order passed by the authorities dated August 17, 2015, was quashed,” the court said.