விற்கப்படும் நாட்டின் இயற்கை வளங்கள்.

நாட்டின் இயற்கை வளங்களை கார்ப்பரேட்களுக்கும் மற்றும் பன்னாட்டு நிறுவனங்களுக்கும் விற்பதை குறித்து விளக்கமான தலையங்கம் எக்கானமிக் மற்றும் பொலிட்டிக்கல் வீக்லி (Economic and Political Weekly dated 05-05-2018) என்ற வார இதழில் வெளியாகியுள்ளது.

Selling India’s Natural Wealth

This government cares less for India’s forests and more for forest-based industries.

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The government wants to hand over to corporate India not just some historical monuments. It is also contemplating letting them take over lands classified as forests because they are not “productive” enough. While social media has been abuzz about the government’s decision to allow corporate houses to “adopt” nationally important historical monuments like the Red Fort, hardly any attention has been paid to crucial natural resources like India’s forests that could also be gifted to private business.

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is currently looking at suggestions and objections raised to the draft National Forest Policy (NFP), 2018 that it released in March. This NFP will replace the existing one that came into effect 30 years ago in 1988. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong in rethinking a policy, particularly in the light of new information thrown up with the advent of climate change. Forests are an essential part of limiting the release of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere as they have the ability to absorb it. Yet, while the draft does address climate concerns, its real intent has alarmed many environmentalists and civil society groups.

The NFP, 1988, which replaced an earlier 1952 policy that still reflected the colonial approach of seeing forests as an economic resource, incorporated an evolving understanding of the role of natural forests for a country’s environment and ecological balance. It recognised that forests were not a sum total of the wood contained in the trees but that they were a repository of biodiversity, protected soil cover and water sources, and provided many other forms of forest produce used by forest-dwelling communities. It also held that diverting forests for non-forest purposes needed to be strictly monitored and only under specific conditions. There were flaws in its implementation, and conserving India’s forest cover has not been an easy task, but the significance of the NFP, 1988 was that it made an important break with the past. This change in the direction of forest policy eventually contributed to accepting that forest-dwelling communities had rights and could play an important role in protecting forests. The path-breaking Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 has cemented these rights, and its impact has already been felt as illustrated by the way the tribals of the Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha voted against bauxite mining in their forests.

While the 2018 draft NFP sounds innocuous on the surface, the devil, as always, lies in the details. Like several governments in the past, it pays lip service to the many essential roles that natural forests play, but then swings back to looking at forests as an economic resource. And so it speaks of “climate-smart value chains” for forest products, and expresses concern at the low productivity of forests. To resolve this it suggests setting up public–private partnerships to regenerate “degraded” forests with less than 40% tree cover. Except that past experience has shown us that such partnerships eventually lead to monocultures, to planting fast-growing exotic species that replace indigenous varieties and that the end result is an industrial plantation and not a natural forest. Furthermore, they will drive away forest dwellers and nomadic communities that are entitled to these common resources. The justification for this suggestion is the crisis apparently facing timber-based industries that are compelled to import wood
because it is not available in sufficient quantities locally.

Besides this, the policy also fails to address other issues affecting forest loss. For instance, a major problem is the loss of forests to developmental and other projects. A right to information (RTI) application by two environmental lawyers, Ritiwik Dutta and Rahul Choudhary, in 2013 revealed that 135 hectares of forestlands are lost everyday to developmental projects like dams, mines and road building. In fact, even as the draft NFP is being discussed, a plan to cut 30,000 trees from the dense, ecologically fragile forests on the Western Ghats in Karnataka has been announced to make way for a 65-km road between Chikkamagaluru and Dakshina Kannada. And the controversy surrounding surrendering forestlands for coal mining continues unresolved.

There is also little discussion on the fragmentation of forests by such diversions. Contiguous forests have some chance of being conserved if policies are strictly enforced. But, when they are parcelled off into smaller pieces, it is easier to encroach on them and slowly whittle them down. We have witnessed this especially in urban areas.

The NFP, 1988 was cognisant of the dangers of handing over natural forests, degraded or otherwise, to private interests. Yet, this is precisely what the draft NFP is trying to push through. If accepted, almost 40% of India’s natural forests could become a virtual timber extraction factory for the private sector. Neither the environment, nor the over 300 million people dependent on forests will benefit from such a retrograde measure. Unfortunately, for a government that is only interested in extracting the maximum revenue from any natural resource, whether it is land, forests, or water, this makes complete sense.

Link: Economic and Political Weekly

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கே.எஸ். இராதாகிருஷ்ணன்.

15-05-2018