The High Court has directed all respondent authorities, including the Goa State Wetland Authority to file their reply affidavits within three weeks in a public interest litigation challenging the boundary demarcation and notification of the ancient Bondvol Lake at Santa Cruz, Calapur.

The PIL was filed by environmental activists and local residents Arturo Carlos D’Souza and Inacio Domnic Pereira. They have challenged the notification dated 20 October 2022, which formally declared Bondvol Lake a protected water body under the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules.

According to the petition, the notification suffers from serious scientific and procedural deficiencies. The petitioners allege that the GSWA arbitrarily restricted the core wetland area to 75,894 square metres, confining it to two revenue survey numbers—Survey Nos. 143/1 and 144/1—instead of basing the boundary on the actual Maximum Water Mark Line identified by the Water Resources Department or the high-flood-level envelope prescribed under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change’s 2020 guidelines.

The official notification demarcated a 50-metre buffer zone measuring 91,488 square metres and limited the “zone of influence” to 23,048 square metres. The petitioners contend that this is contrary to the 2018 report of the High Court-appointed Task Force for Bondvol, which recommended a comprehensive catchment protection area of 5,57,491 square metres within a 200-metre radius of the lake. The petitioners further contebded that such protection is necessary to safeguard steep-slope run-off, natural spring feeder networks and the lake from sewage contamination arising from nearby construction.

The plea states that the petitioners submitted detailed representations to the authorities in August and September 2025, and again in July 2026, seeking a re-examination by scientific institutions such as NEERI or TERI. However, they allege that the authorities failed to act on these representations. Instead, the GSWA issued a public notice on 17 June 2026 engaging a private vendor to conduct physical ground-truthing and install permanent concrete boundary stones based on what the petitioners describe as defective survey boundaries.
The petitioners argue that proceeding with physical demarcation on flawed parameters would create irreversible legal encumbrances, undermine the public trust doctrine and expose the catchment to private real-estate exploitation. They have sought directions to halt the installation of boundary markers and restrain planning authorities from granting construction approvals within a 200-metre radius of the water body pending final adjudication.

The PIL will next be heard on 14 October.