Top forest officer under fire for rejecting recommendations on FRA

India’s senior most forest officer P J Dalip Kumar, director general of forests, is under fire from members of the N C Saxena committee on implementation of Forest Rights Act for misreading their report and thereby rejecting its recommendations.

Updated on: Feb 9, 2011, 21:19:47 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s senior most forest officer P J Dalip Kumar, director general of forests, is under fire from members of the N C Saxena committee on implementation of Forest Rights Act for misreading their report and thereby rejecting its recommendations.

Kumar, in his remarks on the report submitted to environment minister Jairam Ramesh and tribal affairs minister Kanti Lal Bhuria in the first week of January, had rejected most recommendations stating they it will destroy Indian forests.

Environment and tribal affairs ministries have to implement the recommendations of the committee, which seeks more livelihood avenues for dwellers from forests and their active support in conservation.

“The proposal that state forest department will give the protection while the community would have ownership/control is not a workable arrangement,” Kumar said, while responding to the committee’s recommendation that forest dwellers should get control over community land. Ramesh had accepted the recommendation.

Hitting back at the DG, half of the committee members said his claims were based on misreading of the report and were not backed up by their fieldwork. The committee had said that only 20,000 community rights have been give as against individual rights to 1.4 crore individual rights.

The members told both Ramesh and Bhuria that the community forest rights have not been given a fair trial to draw the conclusion that the communities are not interested and the DG’s contention on this issue was inappropriate.

Kumar response also did not elaborate on how the forest departments will help in implementing the community rights, they said.

The written response also termed Kumar’s claim that the committee recommendation that prior occupation should not be insisted for seeking a right was total misreading of the report. “We never made such a recommendation,” said Ravi Chellam, one of the committee members.

In a point wise rejoinder to the DG’s response, the members accused the DG of failing to respond to several other recommendations where the environment ministry is required to take a lead.

One of the issues was illegal eviction of tribals from forestland leading to vitiation of the Forest Rights Act and fresh encroachments reported from some areas. Another issue was involvement of gram sabhas in overall management of forests and to ensure locals get rightful access to minor forest produce such as bamboo and tendu leaves.

They also wanted to know how the environment ministry will ensure that clearance for diversion of forestland complies with Forest Rights Act, including the ministry’s circular of 2009. The ministry had made it mandatory to seek gram sabha approval before diversion of forestland in tribal areas.

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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