However, a good half of this increase is notional – a result of correcting an error of assessment of forests in West Bengal during the 2010 study.
The forest cover in India increased by 5,871 sq km. However, a 3,810 sq km rise in forest cover came from West Bengal, where the forest area was not assessed properly in the previous report. The report stated: “The change in the forest cover in the present assessment is due to exclusion of some areas as forest cover in the previous assessment due to poor quality satellite data.”
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The total forest cover in India stood at 697,898 sq km, showed ‘India State of Forest’, a biennial assessment report prepared by the Forest Survey of India (FSI).
“The increase in the forest area in West Bengal has arisen due to correcting deficiencies in the previous assessment of forest cover,” said a ministry official who did not want to be named.
Another red signal for the government is the decline in the moderately dense forest (lands with tree canopy density between 40 per cent and 70 per cent), which constitutes almost half the total forest area in the country.
India lost 1,991 sq km of this medium quality forests over the two years, a fall of 0.62 per cent.
The decline in the quality of forests could also be gauged from the fall in the total growing stock of wood in the country between the two assessments of 2011 and 2013. A falling stock directly correlates with deteriorating health of the forests in the country.
According to the report, the total growing stock of the country has decreased by over 6 per cent from 6,047 million cum to 5,658 million cum – a decline of 389.11 million cum.
The report notes that large patches of healthy forests turned to scrub or open forests. “The conversion of MDF into Open Forest therefore results in a forest area that is severely depleted in terms of growing stock,” the report stated.
Union environment, forest and climate change minister Prakash Javadekar said afforestation needed to be a people’s movement. “We carry the flag of development in one hand and that of environment protection in the other. Unless we make this a mass movement, we won’t be able to grow forests,” Javadekar said after releasing the report here.
According to the report, forest cover has declined in 15 states with the highest decline in Nagaland, Andhra Pradesh, Tripura and Manipur. However, forest cover increased the most in Odisha, Kerala, Jharkhand and Bihar, if one was to leave out states where errors were recorded. Experts also warn that figures relating to northeast states should be taken with a pinch of salt as shifting cultivation and use of forests in these crop-cycles leads to over-reporting of denudation in some years.
But, Javadekar raised his concern over a sharp decline in the forest cover in the northeastern regions. The report showed that forest area in this part of the country declined by 627 sq km. "Pressure from population rise, encroachment, over grazing and loss of forest area due to activities like mining in certain parts have led to a decline in moderately dense forest," said a ministry official.