What is the issue?
- The MoEFCC recently released the draft National Forest Policy 2018. Click here to know more.
- The shift in approach and various other provisions in the policy raise some serious ecological and social concerns.
What does forest policy aim at?
- The multiple goods and services that forests offer, flowing to different beneficiaries, cannot be simultaneously maximised.
- Forest policy, therefore, focusses primarily on which benefits and beneficiaries to prioritise.
- Another focus area is to decide when and through what process to allow diversion of forest land for “non-forest” activities.
What was the earlier policy approach?
- Forest policy in colonial India focussed on maximising products and revenues for the state.
- The imperial forest department functioned as sole owner, protector and manager of the forest estate.
- Unfortunately, post-Independence policy too continued this 'state-managed forestry' approach.
- Forests were seen as sources of raw material for industry.
- On the other hand, local communities were merely treated as labour.
How did 1988 forest policy address this?
- In a paradigm shift, the 1988 Forest Policy recognised the multiple roles of forests.
- Significantly, it prioritised environmental stability over revenue maximisation.
- It acknowledged the rights of forest-dependent communities on forest produce.
- Also, the policy emphasised people’s involvement in protecting and regenerating forests.
- It thus formally recognised the limitations of state-managed forestry.
What is the post-1988 experience?
- Devolution of control - Joint forest management (JFM) was initiated in the 1990s to facilitate people’s involvement.
- Foresters created thousands of village forest committees.
- But their autonomy and jurisdictions were severely limited.
- Donor money was spent on plantations but activities were stopped once funds ran out.
- “People’s participation” by executive order was too weak.
- What was actually required was substantive devolution of control over forests
- Community rights - The Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 created a historic opportunity for such devolution.
- Its community forest resource provisions gave communities rights to both access and manage forests.
- Forest Diversion - FRA also democratised the forest diversion process.
- It mandated community concurrence for forest diversion once community forest rights are recognised.
- E.g. the Adivasis of Niyamgiri in Odisha exercised this provision to prevent bauxite mining in their sacred hill tracts.
What are the concerns with the new draft forest policy?
- Production forestry - In the past, production forestry has led to replacing
- natural oak forests with pine monocultures in the Himalayas
- natural sal forests with teak plantations in central India
- wet evergreen forests with eucalyptus and acacia in the Western Ghats
- All this had significantly affected forest diversity.
- It has dried up streams and undermined local livelihoods.
- Ecology - The stress on commercially important species like eucalyptus and poplar raises concerns for the ecology.
- These species are known to be water-demanding, with deep root systems that deplete groundwater.
- Also, poplar and eucalyptus have negative allelopathic properties i.e. they do not encourage vegetative growth under their cover.
- Non-indigenous plantation species to meet afforestation targets and timber requirements would be counterproductive to public investments in such initiatives.
- Livelihoods - There are about 1.3 lakh villages in and around India’s forests.
- An estimated 350-400 million people depend directly on these forests for sustenance, involving in management and protection.
- The new policy fails to acknowledge this symbiotic relationship between the tribal people and forests.
- Community Participation - There is little about decentralised governance in the draft policy.
- Local communities would have challenged the production forestry model if they had had a say in forest governance.
- PPP - The 1988 policy clearly states that the requirements of the local communities should not be sacrificed for the sake of forest based industries.
- However, the PPPs in the new policy go against this and will entail more forest destruction.
- It is a way of granting the private sector access to public resources.
- The profits and benefits are also thus likely to end up in corporate hands.
- Mechanism - The draft policy talks of “ensuring synergy” between gram sabhas and JFM committees.
- But the actual need is to replace JFM committees with statutorily empowered gram sabhas.
- Harmonization with other laws like the FRA could certainly leave scope for concern in administrative jurisdictions.
- It may put environmentalists and bureaucracy at loggerheads as the former may see it as an attempt to weaken the role of gram sabhas.
- In all, the new Policy seems to be falling back to the practice of state-managed forestry of the 1950s as well as shifting focus from community and ecology to industry and raw materials.
Source: The Hindu
