Editorial: Poor forest cover

The poor health and spread of India's forests are not the only dismaying aspects brought out by the government's latest 'state of the forests' report. The revelation that the estimate of total forest cover is based on a vague concept of forests, which counts even commercial plantations and horticultural orchards as forests, makes matters worse. This is notwithstanding the fact that the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, specifically bars tea, coffee and rubber plantations from being treated as forests. The official account of forests, therefore, should be taken to mean that the effective forest cover today is far lower than the reported 20.6 per cent of the total geographical area, against the target of 33 per cent. The other worrying aspect is that the overall forest cover has not increased since the enactment of the forest conservation law in 1980, when the extent of cover was first reckoned to have diminished to the worrisome level of 19 per cent. It does not help matters that very dense forests now constitute only a minuscule fraction, a mere 1.66 per cent of the total area being passed on as forests. Even moderately dense forests are no more than 10.12 per cent of the total area. The bulk of the remaining forest land, thus, is merely degraded green cover. Such a decline in and of forest land has ominous implications for the environment as a whole, and for the livelihood security of forest dwellers. Some of the negative economic and social fall-out of the deterioration of forests has begun surfacing in the form of habitat loss, environmental degradation, shrinkage of glaciers and law and order problems created by movements like Naxalism. Besides, the denudation of vegetative cover in the catchment areas of rivers has led to increased siltation, greater frequency of floods and a shorter life for several dams.

The lack of an unambiguous concept of 'forests' poses another set of problems, and impinges on land availability issues. Since forest lands automatically become unavailable for any non-forest activity, precise criteria for classifying land as forests become all the more important. It is of course true that defining a forest is not easy, and there is no globally accepted definition either. But it is also true that none of the several existing laws that apply to forests has attempted to lay down even broad parameters for determining what constitutes a forest. What applies today is an old Supreme Court edict which, intriguingly enough, allows the use of the dictionary description of a forest for this purpose. The recent move by the environment and forest ministry to involve a non-government organisation in putting together a workable definition of forests has also not served the desired purpose. Thus, what is needed urgently is to sort out the confusion by initiating a fresh move to evolve a broad concept, if not a definition in the strictest terms, of forests, taking into account not just the green cover but also the need for protection of the environment and flora and fauna habitats. Once that is done, the next logical step would be to revamp the system of keeping proper records of forests, as is sought to be done through the digitisation of land records for revenue purposes. Otherwise, while genuine forests may remain unprotected, pseudo-forest lands will remain unavailable for economic development, accentuating the unrest over land rights.