Another withdrawal

Forest policy needs to be reviewed to plug existing gaps

The government's move to distance itself from what it released only a few days back as the draft National Forest Policy, 2016, is yet another instance of preparing documents based on half-baked ideas and then putting them out in public domain only to be withdrawn, disowned or retracted later for reconsideration. Similar mistakes were committed recently in at least two other important policy matters - with regard to the draft of the draconian Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, 2016 and the consultation paper issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on net neutrality. Both the documents are now being reviewed afresh. The latest in the series is the draft national policy on the sensitive issue of forests on which rests the livelihood of millions of forest-dependent tribal people and has implications for the health of the country's fragile forest wealth, environment and natural biodiversity.

To be sure, the forest policy blueprint outlined by the Bhopal-based Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM) is not entirely senseless though the environment ministry has chosen to disown it, maintaining that it was uploaded on its official website "inadvertently". True, it has some provisions which irked environment and forest rights activists - and for right reasons - but it also made several positive suggestions, which merit consideration while revising the national forest policy. For one, the overall tone and tenor of the IIFM paper seems to be that a forest is an economic resource, which needs to be tapped for economic gains in a sustainable manner without impairing its inherent productivity. This is in marked contrast to many of the existing norms, which tend to prevent gainful utilisation of even minor forest produce.

The suggested policy regime seeks to open the door for the government to allow industrial plantations in degraded forests through public-private participation. Going a step further, the policy draft rightly stresses the need to encourage farm forestry through incentives and operational support systems. The present laws disallow even the existing agro-forests to be upgraded by replacing the old tree species with new and more productive ones. Another notable feature is the mechanism mooted for managing community forests, most of which currently do not belong to either forest departments or Panchayati Raj bodies and, consequently, suffer from neglect. Better upkeep will restore vegetation on these tracts to serve as community grazing grounds.

All these procedural and policy changes are supposed to be carried out without losing sight of the overall goal of keeping one-third of the total land mass under forests. A significant flaw in the draft that has evoked severe censure is the bid to dilute the Forest Rights Act which provides forest dwellers a say in the management and sustainable exploitation of forests for their living. This bid, aimed evidently at empowering forest departments and undermining the highly successful concept of joint forest management, needs to be resisted. The best course would be to incorporate the useful suggestions of the dumped draft in the final national forest policy and ignore the rest.