The environment and forests ministry's move to seek the help of a non-governmental organisation to define "forest" may sound quaint, but it is a welcome step which should have been taken long ago. There has been a good deal of ambiguity over what should be treated as a forest, as distinct from wasteland or degraded non-agricultural land, especially when it comes to taking up industrial and other projects for which land is required. The lack of clarity has often come in the way of proper utilisation of even poor quality land, merely because it is recorded as forest land. And since forest land cannot be used for anything other than growing a forest, what this has meant is the acquisition of alternative agricultural land for industrial and other purposes. The link to a hot button political issue, pace recent events in West Bengal's Nandigram and Singur, becomes obvious. | |
| The problem of definition arises because the legal perception of what is a forest is based on a Supreme Court verdict of 1996, which went by the dictionary meaning of the word. Since any sort of green cover became eligible to be deemed as forest, a large chunk of the country's land mass came under the purview of the Forest Act, and nothing could be done on any of this land without the permission of the state forest departments, which are as territorially minded as anyone else. The issue got confounded when different state governments came out with their own criteria of green cover for demarcating forests, which now varies from 200 trees per hectare in Madhya Pradesh to virtually bare land in the desert region of Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir. |
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| Lest anyone think that the issue can be easily resolved, the fact is that there are more than 250 definitions of forest already in circulation the world over. While some of the legal definitions of 'forest' in India are meant chiefly for the purpose of revenue collection and exploitation of forest produce, the environmental laws view 'forest' as a green habitat for diverse natural flora and fauna, and which acts as a sink for carbon dioxide. The Indian Forest Act, 1927, belongs to the first category as it aimed broadly at consolidating the then prevailing norms relating to forests and the duties leviable on timber and other forest produce. Where the environmental dimensions of the statute are concerned, they were woven into the law through subsequent amendments. Terms like reserved forests, protected forests, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and others came into vogue because of these amendments. |
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| However, none of this allows anyone other than the forest departments to undertake any activity, even afforestation, on forest land. It may be recalled that the Waste Land Development Board, though an official body created in the mid-1980s for the well-intended task of greening degraded lands so as to upgrade their economic potential, failed to achieve its objective largely because the land needing such treatment belonged to forest departments who would not allow the new Board to enter their fiefdoms. The key issue lies here: however a forest is defined, who owns it and who has rights in it? Today, the forest departments own over 92 per cent of the country's total forests, and view even villagers living in the forests as interlopers without rights. What the country needs is a definition of forest that strikes a balance between the need for protection of the environment and bio-diversity, livelihood security for traditional forest dwellers, and for industrial and infrastructure development. This is not going to be easy because these different objectives will clash. But for that very reason, it needs to get done. |
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