For the past two years, the environment and coal ministries have been at loggerheads about how much more of our forests can be sacrificed to mining. It began more than two years ago, with former environment minister Jairam Ramesh declaring "dense" areas of forests "no-go" for mining, ie where mining would be banned. Chetan Chauhan writes. See PDF
For the past two years, the environment and coal ministries have been at loggerheads about how much more of our forests can be sacrificed to mining. It began more than two years ago, with former environment minister Jairam Ramesh declaring "dense" areas of forests "no-go" for mining, ie where mining would be banned. Until then, his ministry had been clearing each project on merit. Ever since Ramesh announced the new policy, the coal ministry has been trying to dilute it.
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Late last month, a group of ministers that the prime minister set up to play arbiter, scrapped Ramesh's policy. It said that mining should be banned only in "pristine" forests that the Forest Survey of India-FSI for short-should identify. A pristine forest is one rich in biodiversity and cannot be easily rejuvenated by humans. Until then, the environment ministry will clear individual projects on merit, like earlier.
Officials at FSI declined to say when it would complete this identification exercise. But whatever the definition, dense or pristine, environmentalists say the government should place our forests in a larger socio-economic context. Many forests are hotbeds of Maoist violence and house the country's most deprived communities. "The assessment has to be made in the larger political sense," said Kanchi Kohli of the non-profit group Kalpavriksh. "[It should include] the impact of mining on local ecosystems, communities and wildlife."
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Some evidence of this is already available from two forested regions that have seen the most intense mining activity.
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Some evidence of this is already available from two forested regions that have seen the most intense mining activity.
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.
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