Govt plans major green drive

The Planning Commission has approved an ambitious scheme to plant forests in 2.42 lakh village panchayats to achieve the target of covering 33 per cent of India’s geographical area with trees, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 19, 2009, 02:52:07 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Planning Commission has approved an ambitious scheme to plant forests in 2.42 lakh village panchayats to achieve the target of covering 33 per cent of India’s geographical area with trees.

The latest Forest Survey of India report states that only 23 per cent of the

country’s land was covered by trees as per surveys in 2007. Since 2003, the forest cover has increased by about three percent but the real concern is that dense forest cover is actually falling.

In a bid to arrest this trend, the Environment ministry had proposed a Central scheme of Rs 890 crore to have a ‘rich forest’ in each panchayat by 2012.

The Van Panchayat Yohna is, in fact, a revival of an ancient Indian concept of sacred groves in each village which acted as a barrier for warm winds and supplied essential medicinal extracts to villagers.

The yojana will have two components — one involving villagers and the other the corporate world. Under the first component, panchayats will identify land for planting trees and will be responsible for ensuring that the trees survive. In return, the villagers will get right to use minor produce from the forests.

Through the second component the government wants to involve the corporate world. “There are huge chunks of waste land available which the corporate world can be given for

developing”, said an environment ministry official.

The scheme received the Planning Commission’s approval on January 11 and will be introduced in the Cabinet soon.

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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