Cuttack, Sept. 13: Orissa High Court has issued a show-cause notice to the state government asking it to explain why the notification declaring Balukhand-Konark as a wildlife sanctuary should not be quashed for non-completion of statutory proceedings over the past 32 years.

Balukhand-Konark - spread over Chaitanya Bhimpur and Bhatilibhuan mouzas and 44 villages in Puri district - was declared a sanctuary through a notification on April 23, 1984.

The notification was revised on September 1, 1987, and the area was declared the Balukhand-Konark Wildlife Sanctuary. Though the final notification has not been issued, it is considered a deemed wildlife sanctuary and comes under the administrative control of Puri wildlife division.

Arun Kumar Mishra and five other land-owners of the area filed a PIL alleging that people who have land within the notified area had been deprived of right to use or develop their land for the past 32 years.

Under the Wildlife Sanctuary Act, the authorities were required to complete the land acquisition process and compensate the land-owners for their land within two years from the notification date. "But no proceeding, as required under the Act, has been undertaken," the petition said. The petition came up for hearing last Friday.

"After a preliminary hearing, the division bench of Chief Justice Vineet Saran and Justice B.R. Sarangi posted the matter to after eight weeks for hearing along with the reply of the state government to the show-cause notice," petitioner counsel Ranjan Kumar Rout said today.

The court has issued the show-cause notices to the principal secretary of forest and environment department and the collector, district magistrate, forest settlement officer and tehsildar of Puri to file their responses by then.

According to the petition, non-initiation of the required proceedings after the notification and the inconvenience caused due to it had led several land-owners to seek the high court's intervention earlier.

On August 2, 2011, the high court had ruled that the lands in Chaitanya Bhimpur and Bhatilibhuan mouzas and 44 other villages were not coming under the purview of the proposed sanctuary as proceedings under the Wildlife Sanctuary Act had not been completed within two years and final notification declaring the area as sanctuary land had not been issued.