Excessively ambitious

The newly launched Greening India project to extend forest cover to 33 per cent in all the states by 2012 is not the first initiative in this direction; but it is novel in several respects.

Unlike previous programmes that sought to achieve this objective through afforestation, reforestation or wasteland development, this World Agroforestry Centre-assisted project has land and people as its theme, and poverty alleviation through the generation of income from land as its goal.

The situation-specific land and environment upgradation activities are intended to be carried out with the participation of local communities.

The trees to be planted in a particular area are to be selected with their market and value-addition potential in view. And the target land for supporting all this action is 107 million hectares of degraded land, including 64 million hectares categorised as wasteland.

Prima facie, all this seems well-intended and even well-conceived. But that is no guarantee for success. The most significant issue will be access to land. Much of the degraded land in the country belongs to forest departments or panchayats, or private individuals. None of them willingly allows any outside agency to work on their land for fear of losing control.

Moreover, while a new agency called the Forest Development Agency (FDA) with its units in all the major 580 districts of the country has been floated to implement the project, the past record of government organisations does not inspire much confidence in their effectiveness in delivering results on such an ambitious scale.

The National Wasteland Development Board (NWDB), set up in 1985 to carry out the equally imposing task of reclaiming over 2 million hectares of wasteland every year through reforestation and afforestation, is a case in point.

The Board was not been able to meet even a fraction of its target despite liberal support from the then Rajiv Gandhi government. In many regions, the NWDB could not get access to adequate land even for nursery planting let alone for the planting of trees.

Arranging funds for this kind of a project would be another daunting task. The existing national wasteland development programme, conceived in order to develop 88.5 million hectare by the end of the 13th five-year plan, had estimated the financial requirement at a whopping Rs 73,000 crore.

If an even steeper target is now to be achieved in a much shorter time, as is sought to be done through the Greening India project, the required funding is bound to be much greater.

Thus, the project seems to have been conceived on a scale that begs many questions. It is better to build step by step and expand scale after showing success on smaller projects that will build confidence in potential financiers like the financial institutions.

Otherwise, this programme will bite the dust like its predecessors, and the story of India's forest development will remain a dismal one.