India turns greener, but its dense forest cover shrinks
A government report on Tuesday said India’s green cover has increased by over 5,800 sq km between 2010 and 2012 taking into account plantations and commercial species having no ecological value.
A government report on Tuesday said India’s green cover has increased by over 5,800 sq km (or 0.18%) between 2010 and 2012 taking into account plantations and commercial species having no ecological value. In fact, just 31 sq km increase has been recorded in dense forests.
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The moderately dense forests — where most developmental projects have been allowed — has witnessed a decline in cover of around 2,000 sq kms.
The loss, the report claims, has been compensated by increase in green cover of 7,830 sq kms in open forests having canopy density between 10% and 40% — read plantations, orchards and trees planted alongside roads and canals. Two states — Kerala and West Bengal — recording highest increase in green cover was on account of plantations and poor assessment of forests in previous surveys rather than sprucing of green cover, the report admitted.
The survey — released two days before the budget and based on satellite imagery taken after monsoon in 2012 — also counted commercial species such as teak, rubber, eucalyptus or poplar having no ecological value as forests. “The satellite image cannot differentiate between a plantation and a natural forest,” a Forest Survey of India official explained.
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The State of India’s Forests 2013 report had some eye openers for policy makers in that half of the forest does not have adequate rejuvenation and about 30% of recorded forest has no tree cover.
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The State of India’s Forests 2013 report had some eye openers for policy makers in that half of the forest does not have adequate rejuvenation and about 30% of recorded forest has no tree cover.
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Environment minister Prakash Javadekar emphasised on the need of people’s participation in rejuvenating degraded forest, which account for about 8% of India’s 78.92 million hectares of green cover. He also gave the slogan of “janta, jameen and jungle” to make protecting forests as people’s movement.
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.
