The Club Mahabaleshwar

Two separate disputes are often conflated, and the earlier one is commonly misdescribed. In May 2021 it was the Mahabaleshwar municipal council, not the forest department, that served notice on the club: after a video of Anil Ambani strolling on the course went viral during Maharashtra's COVID restrictions, the council's chief officer ordered the club to bar entry to morning and evening walkers, citing the Disaster Management Act, the IPC and the Epidemic Diseases Act. That was a lockdown crowd-control measure about public walkers, not a land-title case, and it has no bearing on golf today.

The live dispute is a different and more serious one. Lokmat's Satara edition reported on 13 June 2026 that the golf ground — some 60–65 acres owned by the Shri Kshetra Mahabaleshwar Devasthan Trust and leased to the club on a 99-year lease running to 2040, on a Heritage Grade I site — had been permitted only to level ground and plant grass, but that complainants allege large-scale excavation raising artificial mounds, more than thirty trees felled and allegedly buried to hide the evidence, wire fencing, sheet-metal sheds, three new internal roads, and locked gates cutting residents off from paths they had long used. The Sub-Divisional Officer ordered a joint panchnama by the municipal council, the revenue department and the forest department, warning of criminal prosecution if the lease and permit conditions were found breached. This is the "forest department" angle: the forest department is one of three departments in that joint inspection and the authority behind the tree-felling limb — the land itself is temple-trust land under lease, not forest land.

What no dated source establishes: whether the joint panchnama was completed, whether any FIR or prosecution followed, whether the lease is at risk, or whether golf play has been restricted at any point. No court or NGT proceeding was found. The club's own golf page, fetched in August 2026, says three of the holes "are currently being upgraded into fully irrigated green holes" — the club's account of the same earthworks the complaint is about — and that page keeps a live golf rate card, which is why the course is recorded as operating. But it is the operator's own page describing contested works, so it cannot settle how much of the course is in play. Sources disagree, the inquiry's outcome is unreported, and a visitor should confirm directly before travelling for golf.