 "Mining should be barred in 40% of India's forests: Forest Survey report")
Over Forty per cent of India’s existing forest cover should be kept safe from mining of all sorts, the Forest Survey of India (FSI) has calculated based on parameters the government set for it to secure green areas of the country. The report, submitted in August 2016, has not yet been acted upon by the Union environment, forests and climate change ministry, while it continues to give piece-meal approval to proposals for mining coal and other minerals across the country.
Business Standard reviewed the report submitted by the FSI to the ministry in August. Out of the 701,672 sq km of forest cover according to the 2015 report, at least 285,853 sq km (40.74%) should be protected from all kinds of mining, the government’s research body has assessed.
This assessment has been arrived at using only a partial set of parameters that were initially drawn up to demarcate important forest areas in the country. The environment ministry had earlier tweaked and restricted the parameters by which FSI was to assess the importance of forest patches across the country.
During the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)'s tenure, a criterion was set up by government experts for identification of ‘inviolate forests’. Initially, the identification of these good forest patches was to be done by measuring forest cover, forest type, landscape integrity, biological richness, wildlife value and hydrological importance. The move to dilute this criterion began in the end phase of UPA government and has continued under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government while the policy has been kept on hold.
The policy was to be applied to both coal and non-coal mining.
The identification of coal blocks under this inviolate policy, too, has been pending finalisation, while the NDA government has allocated, auctioned as well as cleared several coal blocks for mining during its term. Documents show that the government has repeatedly cross-checked the number of coal blocks falling into the inviolate zone and worked to dilute the criteria for selecting these. The same exercise of cross-checking and narrowing the impact on other mines has also been on-going, documents show.
When FSI used the data on hydrological importance along with other criteria to calculate the coal blocks needing to be kept off mining, it found that 216 coal blocks — some of them already under mining and others greenfield — would get classified completely as inviolate. In total, 417 coal blocks would be partially or fully impacted.
Without the hydrological layer, the numbers got scaled down to only 73 out of the total 827 coal blocks evaluated. The coal ministry continued to insist that the coal blocks already under mining should be taken off this pruned list. This would bring the coal blocks demarcated as inviolate to less than 30, an assessment of FSI shows.
These documents show that the government has over the past two years repeatedly checked the impact of inviolate forest policy demarcation on coal blocks and discussed tweaking the criteria to get more blocks opened for mining.
The entire exercise to demarcate precious forests arose out of a Supreme Court order. In July 2011, the apex court ordered that the government’s approval to chop down forests for industries, including mining, should be done with the help of a GIS-based decision support database. It required assessment of forest value based on satellite mapping of the resources.
