India’s forest cover is depleting much faster than you could have ever thought of, thanks to development projects for which large tracts of forest land are handed over to public and private agencies.
An RTI plea filed by a group of environmentalists with the ministry of environment and forests has revealed startling data: the area of forest land diverted across the country on an average stands at 135 hectares (around 333 acres) per day. Such diversions are done for various projects including coal mines, thermal power plants and industrial and river valley projects.
Members of the Environment Impact Assessment Resources and Response Centre (eRc), instrumental in compiling the data, said that the figure in reality is much higher as their analysis pertains only to projects which have sought more than 40 hectares of land.
Ritwik Dutta, an advocate with Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) and closely associated with eRc, said Karnataka is one of the states that has been diverting forest land.
“Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Arunachal Pradesh and Jharkhand are some of the other states which are into large scale diversions. We are compiling state-specific data on the extent of land being diverted,” he added.
Ritwik said more awareness is needed among the people to challenge such projects, and that they should appeal before the National Green Tribunal (NGT) against such diversions.
Neeraj Vagholikar of Kalpavriksh, an environmental action group, said despite the country losing existing forest cover, the figures released by the Centre every year show an increase in green cover.
“The trick here is that the forest department manages to add compensatory afforestation programmes to the total forest cover. However, in reality, such forest cover is virtually non-existent; nobody is sure whether such programmes will be implemented in future,” he said.
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