Speaking at a Constitution Day event last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held the "colonial mindset" guilty for stalling India's development journey. Among other things, he claimed that India is the only country that is in the process of achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement ahead of time. Yet, in the name of the environment, he rued, various pressures are being created upon India.
“To be net-zero for carbon, you must be net-positive for trees, and by 2030 we want to be planting far more trees across the world than we are losing,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in August this year. The plea seemed to fall on deaf ears, as in the first six days of the CoP-26 itself, over nine million trees were cut down in the Brazilian Amazon. India, in its turn, promised to cut its emissions to net-zero by 2070 – which is a clean 20 years away from countries committing to reach the target by 2050.
India has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emission intensity under its nationally determined contributions (NDC), made at Paris in 2015, to achieve which carbon sinks of 2.5-3 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent have to be created, by increasing India’s forest and tree cover to 33% of its land area. But the problem of any climate conversation is that once it goes outside the pale of a climate meet deliberations, the enthusiasm fizzles out. The media, too, is wary of keeping the climate discourse alive round the year.
Now, this pledge to increase India’s forest cover apparently makes it harder to access land for infrastructure projects by states and private entities. Efforts to bring more areas under the definition of ‘forest’ – even degraded land, once recorded as ‘forest’ in some land records, commercial plantations or ‘regions with trees of a certain canopy cover and density’ – are therefore afoot, alongside efforts to increase non-forest use of forest land.
The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) released a consultation paper in October on the proposed amendments to the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), 1980, which proposes to allow private entities to lease forest land without the Centre’s prior approval – which is something the FCA requires. There is great apprehension that with the amendments the government aims to make the forests conducive for private corporations’ business.
As per the provisions of the Act, prior approval of the central government is mandatory before a state government or UT administration makes an order for diversion, de-reservation or assignment of lease of any forest land. The proposed changes envisaged in the paper, in its thrust to prize economy over environment, look already suspect, going by the government’s predilections.
The consultation paper proposed absolving agencies involved in national security projects, border infrastructure projects, land owned by the railways or the road transport ministry that was acquired before 1980 or when the Act came into force.
“Development of infrastructure along the international border areas is crucial for keeping our borders intact and to uphold the sovereignty of the country”, the paper reads. But according to a working paper by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, infrastructure development, for instance, in the ecologically fragile and biodiversity-rich regions (Himalayas and North-East India) is counter-productive because infrastructure and linear development activities involving blasting and excavation of hillsides, creating tunnels through hills, damming of water streams, etc., cause significant and irreversible damage to the ecologically sensitive landscape of the Himalayan regions. It argues that unfettered deforestation and infrastructure development in border areas are not just likely to increase the intensity of environmental disasters but also adversely impact defence infrastructures themselves.
Be it the railways, National Highway Authority of India or the Public Works Department, any decision to grant them exemption from seeking permission calls for a review in view of the possible damage to ecological zones. The draft amendment to FCA, 1980, pending approval by the Union Cabinet and possibly the Parliament, with a spirit to provide greater leeway to use forest land for non-forestry purposes may dilute protection to forests.
The British rulers in India passed the first Forest Act in 1865 which empowered the government by declaring any land covered with trees, brushwood, or jungle as government forest, provided that such notification should not abridge or affect any existing rights of individuals or communities. The Indian Forest Act has been in force since 1927, and was geared to allow the colonial administration to control the extraction of timber, not at preserving forests or addressing deforestation.
The MoEF&CC in 2009 assessed that the Forest Rights Act, 2006, would require handing over 40 million hectares to village-level institutions. So, to go one up over the colonial piece of legislation that Modi thinks has stalled our development so far, any amendment has to factor in its citizens from tribal, rural and forest-based geographies (in collaboration with the Forest Rights Act, 2006) and must not capitulate to the commercial predators and pressure groups.
How do things stand on the ground? The North-East region of India lost 79% of its tree cover in 2020, recording the biggest dip in the country, according to an analysis by Down To Earth. Over 110,000 hectares of tree cover vanished from the region last year, according to the University of Maryland’s forest change data. India lost close to 143,000 hectares of forest cover in 2020, when the overall forest area was 4.6% lower than in 2001, according to the report. The ‘seven sisters’ comprising Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland individually were responsible for 5-14% each of the country’s loss in forest area from 2001 through 2020. Though the experts maintain that reforestation is not the only bulwark against the climate crisis, “nature-based solutions” as a means of fighting climate change alongside protecting biodiversity, tree-planting or reforestation are high on the agenda. Going green thus is neither a colonial diktat, nor a white man’s burden. It is a post-colonial imperative for our own survival.
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