The chalk marks are still there. On the stumps scattered across Saidongar hill, nearly 100 km from Mumbai, the numbers forest officials chalked on each tree before it was cut are visible on the wood. Nearly 1,100 trees were felled before the operation was halted last week. The trunks lie in heaps inside the forest, and guards now stand watch so that villagers who have gathered firewood here for generations cannot carry any of it away.“For the time being, we are selling the stock of firewood that we had collected and kept aside for sale last week. Once this stock is exhausted, we do not know how we will sustain ourselves,” said Vishnu Shankar Pawar, 52, a resident of Pali village.The felling began on Dussehra morning and was stopped after villagers’ protests drew opposition leaders and activists to Karjat. It is meant to clear the way for a 3,000-MW pumped-storage hydropower plant, one that banks electricity by pumping water uphill and releasing it through turbines when demand peaks. The project is being built by Torrent Power at a cost of Rs 13,505 crore, to be operational by 2029. It needs 377 hectares along the Sahyadri range in Raigad district, and more than 32,000 trees.Read | 1,237 trees to make way for Versova-Madh bridge, cutting travel time to 10 minOn the face of it, this is another chapter in India’s development-versus-conservation debate. Its implications run wider. The plant is expected to cut Maharashtra’s dependence on coal-fired power. The forest it will clear sits in a zone a Western Ghats panel had once marked for the highest protection, and scientists say felling on this scale can alter the moisture cycles that bring rain to regions far away. And The Indian Express has found that the tribal families who depend on this forest were never recorded as depending on it, so the project was cleared on the basis that no one would need to be compensated or moved. A woman splits dry branches for firewood at Mohamarwadi, a Katkari hamlet in Pali village beside the felling site at Karjat. Families here gather wood from the forest and sell it for Rs 150 to 200 a day. (Express photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee)A forest that feeds and healsSaidongar, named after the village deity, is a hillock in the 1,600-km Sahyadri range, the Western Ghats, which runs through six states along India’s western coast. Six hamlets, Saidongar, Dhak, Pali, Potal, Ambot and Bhaliwadi, are scattered along its ridges. Of the project’s 377 hectares, 233 belong to the forest department and 144 fall within these hamlets. At the foothills runs the Pej river, from which the plant will draw water. This year it lies dry, black rocks exposed along its bed, a mark of the state’s rainfall deficit.Each hamlet is home to 20 to 25 families, some 150 in all, most from the Katkari tribal community. Over generations they have lived off the forest. Each morning, men and women gather firewood, which they bundle and carry to market for Rs 150 to 200 a day. They harvest honey, and gather mahua, jamun and guava to eat and to sell.Story continues below this adAlso Read | To cut pollution, Maharashtra will fell 32,400 trees. These villages are resistingWith villagers now kept out of the forest, that income is running out.The forest is also their pharmacy. Neem, gulvel (giloy) and adulsa (Malabar nut) treat fever, respiratory illness, dental problems and wounds. For generations, villagers say, they have turned to these plants rather than to doctors. Nana Barku, 72, a community leader, recalled the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, when the world stayed indoors and the villagers carried on in the forest. “We consumed Gulvel leaves, which we believed helped boost our immunity, and not a single person in our community was affected. Just as an urban dweller may find it difficult to survive in the forest, a tribal community like ours cannot survive without the forest. If the forest is gone, our way of life will be gone with it,” Barku said.The Pej river feeds them too. In the monsoon, when the water rises, they catch fish and crabs for the market. With poor rainfall this year the river has largely dried up, and until the next monsoon the forest is all they have. Tree number 438. Forest officials numbered each tree before it was cut, and the enumeration marks are still visible on the stumps and trunks at Saidongar hill, Karjat. (Express photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee)Left out of the forest rights processStory continues below this adThe Forest Rights Act, 2006, gives communities living in forest areas the right to claim the land where they traditionally collect produce. Under Section 6, the Gram Sabha, the village assembly, initiates the process, receives and verifies claims, and forwards its resolutions to the Sub-Divisional Level Committee, a government body that rules on them. Forest land is not meant to be handed over to a project until those rights have been settled.In Pali, that never happened. Forest officials told The Indian Express that the Gram Sabha never submitted any record of which families depend on the forest. With no record before it, the department cleared the land for the project on the basis that there was none, officials said. The environmental clearance (EC) issued to Torrent by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) accordingly states that no rehabilitation of families or villages is envisaged under the project. The roughly 150 families in these hamlets have, as a result, missed out on the compensation the Act would have entitled them to for losing access to forest they have used for generations.Sameer Shinde, Range Forest Officer, Karjat, said the Sabha must record how many tribal families depend on the forest and where they farm, harvest and collect medicinal plants. The department then verifies the site and decides who is eligible for rehabilitation and compensation.“However, in this case, the Sabha did not maintain any records, nor did it submit any recommendations regarding compensation. We have held multiple public hearings over an 18-month period, attended by more than 400 people. Many of them raised the issue of harvesting produce from forest land, and we encouraged the Sabha to submit a formal record. However, the records never came to us, and without them, we cannot process any compensation or rehabilitation,” Shinde told The Indian Express. Balu Pawar, sarpanch of Pali, was unavailable for comment.Story continues below this adForest records also show that the department began felling last week without a no-objection certificate from the Pali panchayat. “The Forest Department does not require an NOC from the Panchayat to begin tree-felling. We only need the MoEFCC clearance, which has already come through,” Shinde said.The halt is temporary, he said, and no decision has been taken on when felling will resume. “The drive was stopped temporarily to ensure that the law and order situation in the village is maintained,” he added.Home to leopards, sloth bears, pythonsIn 2010, the MoEFCC set up the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel under the ecologist Madhav Gadgil to map how much of the range needed protecting. Its report, submitted in August 2011, identified 10 districts in Maharashtra within the ecologically sensitive Western Ghats and graded them: ESZ 1 for the highest protection, ESZ 2 for development under moderate restrictions, and ESZ 3 for regulated, sustainable development.The panel’s map placed Pali, the village panchayat in Karjat taluka where the project is located, in ESZ 1, the zone in which it recommended no new large dams, mining or major infrastructure. Its recommendations were never implemented. A later panel narrowed the protected area, and the final notification has been through several drafts since. The Bhimashankar forest, also ESZ 1, is 15.5 km from the site, the project’s EC report notes.Story continues below this adThe EC report lists 26 species in the project’s study area under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, the highest level of legal protection. Fourteen are mammals, among them the leopard, Indian sloth bear, Indian porcupine, sambar deer, antelope, jungle cat and Indian wolf. Six are birds, including the Indian peafowl, the osprey, the black eagle and the white-eyed buzzard. Six are reptiles, including the Asian chameleon, Russell’s viper, Indian cobra, rat snake and Indian python.A state forest official said these were recorded across the broader study area, the wider region surveyed for the clearance, which adjoins the Bhimashankar forest. The report does not establish that all 26 were sighted within the 377 hectares actually being taken, or the 233 hectares of forest to be handed over to the project.“Leopard sightings are frequent in those villages at the hillocks. Female leopards often give birth and shelter their cubs in the hillocks close to the villages, where prey such as poultry and dogs are easily accessible. This makes the settlements easy hunting grounds for leopards,” the official said.The project proposal earmarks Rs 3.26 crore for a Biodiversity and Wildlife Conservation Plan. “The environmental clearance mandates that a wildlife conservation action plan for the prominent species identified during the survey be implemented before the commencement of project activities. This is intended to keep human-animal conflict in check,” the official said.If the forest goes, the rain may moveStory continues below this adFelling on this scale could change rainfall far from Karjat. A 2018 study, “Moisture Supply From the Western Ghats Forests to Water Deficit East Coast of India”, by four researchers from IIT Bombay and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, found that evapotranspiration, the transfer of water from soil and vegetation into the atmosphere, makes the Western Ghats forests a crucial source of moisture for regions downwind.That moisture is carried towards Tamil Nadu and feeds rainfall in the Cauvery basin, the study found. Deforestation in the Ghats could significantly reduce rainfall and water availability there, with the effect sharpest in dry spells and drought years. The forests contribute around 3 mm of rain a day in August and September across much of Tamil Nadu and the Cauvery basin, and removing the vegetation could raise average surface temperatures in Tamil Nadu by 0.25 degrees Celsius.“You will often see photographs of dense vegetation with thick fog hanging above the forest canopy. That is an illustration of the moisture being released by the vegetation. The water vapour released through evapotranspiration becomes an important source of atmospheric moisture and can contribute to rainfall in regions far away,” said Raghu Murtugudde, a retired professor at IIT Bombay, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland and a co-author of the study.The strongest effect was over Tamil Nadu, Murtugudde said, but Maharashtra could feel it too. “We are already experiencing the impacts of global warming, but changes in land use, including deforestation, urbanisation and agriculture, can amplify those impacts at the local level. These changes can have significant negative consequences,” he added.Story continues below this adProfessor Amey Pathak of IIT Kharagpur, who works on atmospheric moisture transport, said forests also hold soil moisture, recharge groundwater and maintain soil health, so deforestation also degrades soil and alters groundwater.“I cannot directly quantify the impact of clearing forest cover in the Sahyadri on rainfall in a particular region. However, numerical studies have established that land-use changes in one location can influence rainfall in distant downwind regions. The effects may extend beyond the boundaries of the state, and this is an important factor that needs to be considered,” Pathak said.The case for the projectChief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has maintained that the plant is the need of the hour because it will cut the state’s dependence on polluting thermal power stations. According to NITI Aayog’s India Climate and Energy Dashboard, 74.19 per cent of Maharashtra’s electricity comes from coal-based plants. The facility will have a capacity of 3,000 MW, almost a tenth of the state’s demand and three-quarters of Mumbai’s, going by the same dashboard.Solar and wind produce power only when the sun shines and the wind blows. Pumped storage is a way of banking that power for the evening peak. The plant will have two reservoirs, one on top of the hill and one lower down. Water released from the upper one drives turbines on its way down and is pumped back up when demand is low.Story continues below this ad“The biggest advantage of pumped storage is that it helps bridge the gap between electricity generation and demand. Electricity itself cannot be stored directly on a large scale. During periods of low demand, surplus electricity is used to pump water from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir, converting electrical energy into the potential energy of water. When demand rises, the stored water is released through turbines to generate electricity,” said Pratim Kundu, associate professor at IIT Mandi.Renewables at times produce more than can be used, Kundu said. “Therefore, pumped-storage facilities can utilise this surplus electricity to pump water into the upper reservoir and store the energy for later use,” he added.In a written response to The Indian Express, Torrent said the reservoirs will mainly use rainwater rather than the Pej. “The supply assessment considers seasonal runoff (monsoon water) rather than assuming that today’s river flow continues throughout the year,” the response read.Torrent also said it will build a 50-bed multispeciality hospital offering free treatment to tribal people, along with schools and skill development centres. Its EC application promises 2,000 jobs during construction. “Certain preliminary local developmental activities have already been taken up like school renovation, lighting high-mast, medical camp etc. We will continue village-level engagement on priorities and implementation progress,” the response read.