Green cover-up
Why has India's forest cover declined?
The latest edition of the “India State of Forest Report”, or ISFR, which is compiled biennially, is worrisome. The report claims that 367 square kilometres of forest have been lost in the past two years; and that the total forest and tree cover actually shrank, to 23.81 per cent of the country’s total area. These are a reversal of the trends that had been claimed earlier. Oddly enough, the bulk of this decline has been reported from Andhra Pradesh and the ecologically fragile hills of the north-east, even as the reasons given for the contraction of forested area need to be made clearer than they are in this report, and will require explanations from the ministry of environment and forests.
The report, moreover, does not throw much light on the actual vegetative health of India’s forests, which affect the livelihood of as many as 200 million people by some estimates. In any case, any decline in forested cover is hard to justify given the fact that the government is sitting on a massive corpus of about Rs 25,000 crore under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund, raised through penalties for diversion of forest land and meant especially for the maintenance of the total amount of green cover. Interestingly, a relatively tiny stretch in Andhra Pradesh’s Khammam and Warangal districts, abounding in highly valuable teak plantations, is said to account for the bulk of that state’s total loss of 281 square kilometres of woodland. This, surprisingly, is partly attributed to the activities of Maoist extremists, which is an extremely dubious explanation: Naxalites are not known for destroying the forests which provide them with essential cover. This is borne out by comparison with states like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, where Naxal presence is far greater than in Andhra Pradesh. The forest coverage in these states has either remained intact or expanded. Equally baffling is the bid to hold chopping of eucalyptus trees responsible for declining forest cover in some states, and the expansion in agro-forestry for the increase in the green cover in some others, considering that eucalyptus plantations are raised only for harvest on maturity and agro-forestry’s inclusion in green cover statistics is highly debatable.
The deterioration in the north-east’s abundant forest expanse, on the other hand, is due to the practice of shifting cultivation by some residents of the area — at least according to the report. By this traditional practice, nomadic groups clear woodland for farming the land for a few years before moving on to new areas, leaving the land for regeneration. This practice is highly injurious to mountain ecology, and should have been disincentivised long since. Yet, as a recurring event, it is difficult to see how it can suddenly cause a permanent loss of forest stock. It is clear that the government needs to review the entire gamut of forest policies, including norms for monitoring forest cover, to get a truer picture of the state of forests.