Govt decides not to split forest services

The Indian Forest Service (IFS) will not be split into two — one each for wildlife and forestry. The suggestion of separation had come from a committee of National Board for Wildlife headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Updated on: Aug 22, 2010, 23:35:45 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Indian Forest Service (IFS) will not be split into two — one each for wildlife and forestry. The suggestion of separation had come from a committee of National Board for Wildlife headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

“The ministry has declined splitting the forest services into two,” said the country’s Director General of Forests P.J. Dalip Kumar. “The reason that wildlife conservation has to take support from forest conservation only.”

The ministry’s decision comes as a sigh of relief for IFS officers, who man India’s most dense forests and endangered species in remote areas. They feared that the split would undermine the importance of their service.

“We had never advocated for splitting the service,” a senior IFS officer said. “But we always wanted that a separate department of forests should be created in the ministry to be headed by an IFS officer.”

Number of wildlife expert such as Valmik Thapar, Belinda Wright and Bittu Sehgal had advocated splitting of the service for better protection of endangered species. But, the ministry believes the splitting will create more problems than providing solution.

In a bid to improve the IFS, the government has decided to start three fellowship programmes in the 12-plan starting from 2012.

They would be ‘Hari Singh Fellowship’ for new officers and ‘SK Fellowship’ and ‘C. Ranganath Fellowship’ for officials in different levels in the cadre.

Under Hari Singh Fellowship, officials found to be having extraordinary interest and aptitude for wildlife, would be selected for specialised training at the Wildlife Institute of India.

“The aim of this fellowship is to catch them young, because once they join administrative work and other duties; it becomes difficult to go back to study,” Kumar said.

For the mid-career officers have food field knowledge, the ministry will have SK Fellowship for specialisation in any forestry disciplines. In C. Ranganath fellowship, the ministry will support the selected officers with grants for liberal travel, equipment, to engage research assistance and travel abroad to study abroad.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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