Every year, the ministry of environment releases statistics for the forest cover in India. The exercise is routinely conducted in a self-congratulatory tone as, overall, the green cover seems to be increasing. These salubrious statistics, however, do not reflect the several disputes over existing forest lands. To get an idea of just how acrimonious the fight over forests is, visit the office of the committee set up by the Supreme Court to look into forest disputes. The Central Empowered Committee (CEC) has two rooms with red-taped files and voluminous reports stacked from floor to roof. Each of them has to do with disputes over forests. What started with a complaint on a postcard to the court from an unknown Kerala environmentalist, T.N. Godavarman Thirumalpad, has snowballed into an omnibus case on forest protection. The court realised early on that it could not hear all of these and set up the CEC with delegated judicial powers. Since 2002, the CEC has heard 2,000 cases and works overtime to cope with the growing pile. Before the dispute, these projects have been cleared by the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) set up by the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF). The FAC has a critical job: to decide how much forest land is to be diverted for drinking water projects, irrigation projects, transmission lines, railway lines, roads and mining. They are responsible for maintaining that crucial and delicate balance between conservation and development. The FAC has been in the news recently with the standoff between the ministry and the Supreme Court on the appointment of its members. Though the seven-member committee is headed by the director general of forests, the body has a fairly low profile and meets once a month. The last time it met was in September 2006. There is complete lack of transparency about its deliberations. If this scenario is scary, the FAC’s job is going to get more complicated in the next few years. The Forest Conservation Act 1980, of which they are the custodians, is going to be under increasing threat. Mining, by far, is making the most demands on India’s forests. It is followed by encroachments, then irrigation projects and finally roads.Some of the reasons for the growing challenges lie outside the ambit of forest laws. Thanks to the spiraling international price of metals, a mine is no less than a lottery. The cost of extraction of iron ore is Rs 16 per metric tonne and it sells at Rs 2,250 per metric tonne. Enormous profit margins raise the stakes several times. There can be no bigger proof of mines being profit spinners than this: when the court introduced the concept of Net Present Value in 2005, where the project proponent is required to pay Rs 5.8 to 9 lakh per hectare for using forest land, there was shock and disbelief. Even the MoEF argued for a rate way below the present one. One year later, all the mine owners are queuing to pay up. The fact is that a forest, when it exists as a forest, does not have any commercial value. Once it is destroyed, it has tremendous value. As shown in the Tiger Task Force report, Joining the Dots, the mining map of India is contiguous with its forest map. While forests hold vast reserves of mineral wealth under them, they also hold the key to our water, the monsoons and oxygen. With the value of minerals and timber going up, the conservation strategy has to be re-drawn now. The CEC settling disputes can only be a stop-gap arrangement. Prior to 1980, when the Forest Conservation Act was passed, the rate of diversion of forest land for non-forestry purposes was about 1.43 lakh hectare per annum. The FC Act managed to check it before the government began granting permits for the timber industry with abandon. It was in the 1990s that the Supreme Court stepped in. In December 1996, the Court ordered a ban on timber felling and closure of all unlicensed sawmills. The rate of forest cover depletion per se has came down but dense forests continue to vanish. The State of Forest Report 2003 shows that the country has lost 26,245 sq km of dense forests between 2001 and 2003. On the other hand, the open forests — forests with a crown density of only 10 to 40 per cent — have increased by 29,000 sq km. There is little that one can find wrong with the FC Act. The Court too, in its several landmark judgments, has merely reinforced the existing law. The only difference was that a court order was taken more seriously. When chief secretaries started issuing orders to close sawmills that did not have licenses (which should have been fairly obvious before the court order), there was mayhem. The CEC, aided by amicus curiae Harish Salve, went to the field and reported the ground reality to the court. For the first time, court-led monitoring led to the imprisonment of two Maharashtra ministers for flouting court orders in the sawmills case. Suddenly, the ministry’s powers shrank while the CEC became more visible. While this mechanism may work for a while, settling disputes is not a good way of managing forests. Instead of thinking up ways to protect forests better, the ministry now is engaged in settling scores with the judiciary and its arm, the CEC. The present stand-off between the ministry and the court is the ministry’s way of battling the alternative but powerful mechanism set up by the court. They are indignant over the court suggesting names for the FAC specially when most names are of known “activists’’. Their indignation is perfectly justified. It would have been justified even more if the ministry had actually worked as the true custodian of the forests.
