Whose forests are they?

On the one hand, Soz speaks of increasing access of communities, including tribals residing in and around forests, to the resources. On the other, he lends a sympathetic ear to industry. These are diametrically contradictory positions.

When asked about this contradiction, Soz defends his stance: “Tribals should derive benefit from forests and lend a helping hand in conservation, but there was no harm in talking to the paper industry in order to understand their problems.”

There is a dogged persistence about the Indian Paper Manufacturers’ Association of India’s (IPMA) attempts to wrest control of forest land. With every change in the Environment Ministry — and there have been four new ministers within a span of three years, three new secretaries and three new inspector generals of forests — this proposal is resurrected albeit with minor changes. This time the Association realised how ineffectual the Environment Ministry was in taking important decisions and routed its proposal through the more powerful Industry Ministry.

The proposal has been to the Cabinet several times and was rejected each time. Desperate to push the project, the industry had even termed its proposal `Greening India’ to give the impression that the proposal will help regenerate the country’s rapidly diminishing forest cover. But this is clearly a greenwash. According to N.C. Saxena, Secretary in the Department of Rural Affairs and Employment: “Using degraded forest lands for growing raw material for industry will be setting the clock back to the 1960s, showing that we have learnt nothing from the past 30 years of trying to create man-made forests, which were ecological disasters, besides completely alienating the people and leading to faster degradation.”

Saxena has been studying forestry in India for many decades and is completing a study called `Forests and the Poor in India’. No one would have objected, says Saxena, had the industry been leased non-forest desert lands of Rajasthan, saline lands of Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh or the ravines of Madhya Pradesh, which are so degraded that they do not support the livelihood needs of the poor.

But the case of degraded forest lands is different. These tracts suffer from extreme biotic pressures, and require not capital investment, nor even higher technology, but protection and recuperation, which can be done only by involving local people. Industry has neither the expertise nor patience to do this. Saxena notes that the West Bengal experience shows that about 2,000 peoples’ forest protection committees have regenerated more than 300,000 acres of sal forests at no extra investment, but simply by protection on the promise of sharing wood and non-wood products with them. “If lands on which people’s livelihoods are dependent are given to industry, they may have to employ muscle power to keep people at bay, thus escalating social tensions, which are already quite acute in several forest and national park areas,” Saxena added.

On the other hand, officials say that lack of resources is proving to be a major handicap in the country’s afforestation effort with the budget allocation as well as international aid proving insufficient. But these are specious arguments. West Bengal has shown that with the involvement of local people, forest tracts can be regenerated at no extra cost. All that is required is for forest officers to relent a little on their `guns and fences’ approach to conservation.

According to one proposal with the Ministry, the State-level Forest Development Corporations which will enter into a Memorandum of Understanding with the industry in which forest land of a size not less than 100 hectare would be leased out for 30 years at first, and extended by another 30 years, if necessary. This will give them the right to afforest with the support of a technical committee and have a right over nearly three fourths of forest produce at the time of harvesting. To protect against monocultures, the plan said three varieties would be planted.

But the scheme was criticised by many eminent persons, including M.S. Swaminathan, eminent agricultural scientist; C.H. Hanumantha Rao, former member of the Planning Commission; and Anil Agarwal, well-known environmentalist. In a letter to the Prime Minister they said: “The present move reverts to subsidising the industry, cutting off all economic, social and equity spin-offs that would arise from raising trees on relatively poor and medium farmlands.”

They noted that the scheme would directly squeeze the farmers by jeopardising the farm-forestry programme through which the farmers not only produce wood by planting trees between their crops to be sold to the industry, but also did so in a sustainable manner.

Other local groups agitating against the proposal have been stressing that this move violates the ministry’s own National Forest Policy of 1988. They stressed that it would reduce access of the local communities to fuel wood and other minor forest produce on which they depend.

Nonetheless, several States have gone ahead and set up forest development councils in various forms which range from assigning bamboo forests to paper industry in Orissa to Madhya Pradesh’s attempt to lease out forest land to industry. Arrangements similar to that of Orissa prevail in various States and under these bamboo is supplied at subsidised rates to the industry. In Gujarat for instance, industry pays only 15 per cent of the market rate for bamboo.

The 1988 policy discourages subsidising raw material for industry and the explicitly mentions that the needs of forest dwellers must get priority over forest produce. “Despite this,” says Saxena, “the poor in central India have to meet their demand for bamboo by stealing, while the industry gets subsidised bamboo and has the first charge”. This State-subsidised profitability of forest-based industry, as has been noted by internationally-acclaimed ecologists Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, has resulted in the non-sustainable use of forest resources. The question is how much longer this can be allowed to go on?