From India's largest newsroom, I'm Arun George and this is the Times of India podcast. Mani sabapati more than a prastavid karthak is bilko patiya. After a brief debate, the Forest Conservation Amendment Bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha on the 2nd of August.
The Opposition had walked out of the debate on the law in the Upper House of Parliament to protest against the situation in Manipur. In its preamble, the Bill talks of maintaining or enhancing forests, improving the livelihoods of those dependent on forests and conservation of forests. But not everyone's buying these claims. I think we need to understand
that. This amendment does not strengthen the Forest Conservation Act, it weakens the Forest Conservation Act. And the only reason that the government has not done away with the act completely is because it wants to retain that sort of thing leaf of well, there is still a Forest Conservation Act on the books and we are still concerned about conservation.
As you notice in the amendment that was made, there's a beautiful preamble about how important forests are now, even for this, that and the climate change and so on and so forth. The preamble didn't exist in the 1980 Act. You've added a beautiful preamble, and everything that you have done is actually going against that preamble. That's Doctor Sharad Chandra Leli, who we spoke with to better understand the issues with the new law.
In today's episode, he explains the issues with the new law and why it doesn't really stick to its promise of protecting India's forests. Sharad Leli is a senior fellow and convener of the Center for Environment and Development at the Bengaluru based Ashoka Trust for Research in ecology and the
environment. He explains that the original Forest Conservation Act was passed in 1980 because it was felt that states were being a little too generous in that diversion of forest land for other purposes. So the Forest Conservation Act was passed in 1980 and this was seen as a response to the movements in the 1970s, drawing attention to environmental degradation in general and deforestation in the Himalayas in particular.
Including the Chipco movement and Indira Gandhi's sense was that well this was basically the reason why we were losing a lot of forest is because the states were being very casual about diverting forests to non forest. Especially in those days there was a lot of diversion of forests land to agricultural lands. States had not really successfully implemented land reform.
And there was therefore a lot of land, hunger, landlessness in these in states where they then found it very convenient to hand over forests to people to cultivate. So the 1980 Forest Conservation Act is basically an attempt by the central government to say the states are too close to the problem, they don't have good judgment, they are politically much more captured by local interests, and the central government is a little distant from this politics.
And we'll have a more balanced view of whether or not a particular diversion should take place. So how did the Forest Conservation Law aim to protect forests? Any diversion of forest land above a certain size will require the permission of the central government. They introduced the idea of compensatory afforestation, saying that if permission is given, you will have to do a certain amount of compensatory afforestation to compensate the loss of forests.
In a way, they're hoping that, well, if you have to divert 100 acres at least we'll get equivalent 100 acres of plantation afforestation somewhere else Done. In that sense, we are still conserving the total forest cover in the country. Now, what was meant to happen? Was that the central government should have stopped the allocation of forest land for different purposes.
But Sharad Leli says that didn't really happen, especially after the economic liberalization of 1991 when the stopping of projects due to environmental concerns began to be viewed as a hindrance to India's economic. Growth over time, especially after 1991 liberalization of the economy.
The pressures on claiming forest land for development, whether it is highways, dams, mining, airports and so on, increased dramatically And the tendency after 1991 was to, regardless of which government was in power, was to say, well, these are developmental needs and they have to be met somehow, whereas the claims of landless people were seen as not really genuine or not really contributing to development.
And so one clear trend has been that very little land has been allowed to be diverted for agriculture or even pre 1980 conversions of the physically forest Land that was converted agriculture before 1980 were also not allowed to be regularized. The trend with respect to development projects was that initially there was a certain amount of regulation or a certain amount of denying forest clearance for some projects and so on.
Over time, that has dwindled and the developmental pressures have increased. And the government's overall approach has been so much more pro development post liberalization that any attempt by the forest advisory committees to hold up clearance is seen as coming in the way of development. In this mix.
Came what is known as the Godhavarman judgment of the Supreme Court in 1996. The Godhavarman judgment in 1996 really did amend the law in practice was targeting the problem that the Forest Conservation Act says any forest that is diverted for non forestry purposes must go through this process laid down by the Act. The judgment came in response to a petition that was seeking to protect forest land in the Nilgiris from illegal timber. Question is. What is forest?
All laws operate through legal record, especially land related laws of forest related laws. So anything that was notified as a reserve forest or a protected forest by the government was considered as the forest that is relevant to the implementation of the Forest Conservation Act. What the court observed or was brought to its notice was that there were last tracks of land partly in the Northeast, partly in some pockets in central India, certainly in pockets in the Western Guards.
Which are actually forested, but have not been legally notified in the category of reserve forest or protected forest. And this is because of a whole bunch of historical quirks. It's not necessarily intentional or they've got a name which doesn't look like forest, it's not under the Indian Forest Act, it's notified under some other act and so on.
So all these lands which were physically covered with forest were government lands, were escaping the ambit of the Forest Conservation Act and these were being diverted happily by the state governments. As if there was no forest on
them. So that was the focus of the Godavarman judgment, saying any land that is covered by forests should be brought under the procedures of the Forest Conservation Act. When it comes to divergent, of course, the courts approach ends up being also very blunt, because the court did not distinguish, for example, between privately owned land which might be covered with either a plantation or with a natural forest, but it has been is regularly harvested for timber.
The court took a negative view of these this timber harvest in general till the states in the northeast fought back and said that no, you have to allow timber harvest to continue and the states. So over time the Godavarman judgments complete stoppage on harvesting was relaxed. But this confusion about whether the act, in terms of diversion, applies to private lands, private agricultural lands, private forest, That ambiguity remained.
Sharad, Lili says. This ended with states categorizing these forest lands as deemed forests, and they would be protected under the Forest Conservation Act. So just to clarify, you had a law which protected forests and then a judgment that protected forest lands that hadn't already been categorized as forest by states.
While debating the new bill, Environment Minister Bhutendra Yadav said the ambiguity arising from this Supreme Court judgment is among the things the new amendment seeks to remove. But does the new law really do that? The amendment does not address this problem at all. What the amendment is doing is in a sense undoing the go the
government judgment. It just goes back to saying any land notified as forest, either in the forest departments record or in the revenue departments record is to be covered by the act, nothing else. Which means in particular in the Northeast there are large types of land which are community owned lands which will lose this protection. There are state owned lands but not notified as forest. Those will lose that protection. What does it mean to lose
protection? It means diversions of those lands for non forestry purposes, whether it is highways, Rd. mining, train, railway lines, dams, whatever will no longer have to go through the permission of the Central Ministry. That is the main implication of the amendment. There's been criticism that the new law now gives too much power to the central government. Would you say that's the case? I wouldn't say that because.
It's not as if the central government can divert land without the state government putting up a proposal. The ownership of the land is still with the state governments. Let us say there's a proposal to do a create a highway or whatever else. That proposal has to go to the state government, and the state government has to endorse that proposal before it comes to the Forest Advisory Committee. Now, exempting certain lands simply means that the diversion can happen without it coming to
the central government. So in that sense, the central government has given up control, not increase its control. One major criticism of the new law is the fact that it allows for any infrastructure development within 100 kilometers of the borders if it's deemed necessary for national security, Sharad Leli says. This in fact gives some departments the freedom to take up any project without fear of having to make changes due to
environmental concerns. The assumption is that if the army proposes a road, the state government is never going to say no. And now it doesn't need to come to the central environmental ministry. So in a sense the central Defense Department is now sort of lost any fear of the central environmental ministry doing its due diligence and perhaps either holding up the project or suggesting a different routine or saying that you know this particular forest is to pristine, so you should not
really cut through it at all. All these possibilities are now ruled out. So the central environmental ministries powers have been cut. Correspondingly, the Central Defense Department's powers, you know, go out by by default that they don't have anymore regulation on top of them. We also told that the national security things can be questioned. We are sort of trailing an adversary like, say, China, because we don't have the same willingness to do things that say a China is.
Why would you argue that even a defense project needs that examination by an environmental ministry? In any democracy, the principle is one of checks and balances. In any good governance systems, there are principles of checks and balances. The idea is that I may in all good faith that as a Ministry of Defense or the Ministry of Irrigation or the Ministry of Power propose a project thing.
The country absolutely needs this coal mine, needs this dam, needs this highway, needs this security infrastructure. But you have to have the views of other stakeholders tabled and their views considered in a balanced manner. So the FCA process was allowing the Ministry of Environment to
incorporate its views. And frankly, there is almost no example in front of us where some national security projects, some incredibly important national security project was enormously delayed because of the Ministry of Environment putting its put down and saying no. So this is just a bogey. This whole story about delays, the whole story about denial, there is no evidence of such denial. There may be evidence of delays because obviously if you have a process, you have to complete
the process that will take time. Ill give you the example of mining projects that required more than 100 hectares of forest diversion. From 2009 onwards, and we were looking at to what extent FRA was complied with. Between 2009 and 2018 there were 128 mining projects that required more than 100 hectares of forest diversion and we asked the question first of all, how many were denied forest clearance and they were like 7 which were denied.
Forest clearance. In a few cases the project was withdrawn for some other reason and a few cases they were denied on some other technicality. In no cases were they really denied because the forest was too important to lose. In no cases were they denied because the local community did not give its consent, because there was number process through which local consent was really sought in spite of the Niyamgiri
judgment. So we are looking at a forest clearance process which is as it is heavily compromised. Now you're basically just saying that we, we don't even want this very weak process anymore. The Ministry of Defense will decide what is important and nobody else will, will ask any questions, even to the external saying, well, can you route the highway differently, don't go through this ecosensitive area, maybe take a different route, Nothing.
There are going to be absolutely no other opinions sought. I think that's a problem if you're saying that the center is giving more power to the states to decide how to go ahead, isn't it? Like, I know this is a slogan that's now been ditched by even the World Bank, but wouldn't it fit within that ambit of ease of doing business in some senses? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean the overall intent of of the central government over the last 10 years has been ease of
doing business. When in 2014, Prakash Raodekar became the Minister of Environment, he openly said that ease of doing business was the main goal.
And when they celebrated one year of the regime in 2015, you, the Ministry of Environments website, was basically celebrating how they had speeded up environmental clearances and forest clearances when Anil the Way took over as Minister of Environment. After that, he held a meeting of all the chairs of the environmental clearance committees, the various committees that deal with various kinds of projects, and he told them very categorically.
And I was there in the meetings, since I was a member of one of the environmental clearance committees at that point that read my lips. My government's motto is ease of doing business. So it was very open. It was not at all implicit. It was very open that the government's foremost focus was ease of doing business, and anything that came in the way was seen as a hindrance.
And environmental reasons for either reducing the size of a project, changing the shape of the project or occasionally maybe thinking about saying no to the project were to be absolutely not tolerated. And do you have an assessment of what the potential? Cost could be of this. No, it's very difficult to assess the cost because you don't know what we have in mind, right, in terms of whether it is national security, infrastructure in general, highways, linear projects, dams and so on.
But we are seeing the track record. For example, in the Northeast, the amount of dam building that has happened and that is going on and the amount of land that has been diverted without even applying the FCA process properly, certainly without local consent, all those and communities already have rights over there, those lands, but they have been completely bypassed.
So we can see that happening. The negative environmental impacts, human impacts, flooding impacts of these kinds of constructions, dam constructions in the Northeast are well documented. Now what we have in mind in terms of the expanded developmental and security activity, one can only guess what those impacts will be. We're in conversation with Doctor Sharad Leli about the new amendment passed by Parliament to the Forest Conservation Act.
As we discussed earlier, one major aspect is the clearance of forests for projects linked to national security, which can now take any form. Another major issue is what is being classified as a forest. There has been criticism of what India considers forests, given that even plantations make the cut. Sharad Lili says the big issue for him is the lack of transparency in the data.
The Forest Server of India's methodology of mapping forests or estimating forest cover is flawed in the sense that. They define it as simply 3 cover, any piece of land which is larger than .1 hectares and having more than 10% tree canopy cover, which could be an Arika plantation, it could be a coconut plantation, it could be a rubber plantation.
All gets classified as forest cover and that is I think a flawed definition and therefore they overestimate forest because they start including all these plantations which are most of the time on private lands. But the other way of also looking at it is that. We shouldn't get hung up about again a binary definition of forest and non forest because forest comes in different shapes and sizes and these different forms of forest have different, you know, implications for
benefits. For example, the forest department has historically cut down natural forest and created tea plantations or monocultural Sal areas. So you have a whole range of vegetation types which have different levels of benefits when it comes to biodiversity or local livelihoods, carbon and so on. And so it's better to actually, for what forests should be doing, is giving us much more detail in terms of different types of forest cover or tree vegetation cover that exists on
the landscape. What are the percentages, what are the area where do they occur? Putting their maps into the public domain on top of Google Earth so people can also cross check and maybe point out errors and not get into this binary of forest non forest. Because that is actually not a very productive way of thinking about the problem. The forest as a source of resources, as something that we need because as a nation that has to cater to so many people we need those resources.
What is your argument for preserving forests in the way they exist, rather than disturbing them? So I think we cannot take a binary perspective of undisturbed forest versus no forest. There's a whole gradient because forests provide benefits to
different kinds of stakeholders. From the local forest dweller, maybe Adivasi who depends on the forest for firewood, for grazing, for medicinal plants or non forest products and so on to let's say farmers downstream who depend upon the catchment being closed by forest in order to regulate these stream hydrology. Of course, we now talk about the importance of forests from a biodiversity perspective, which is important for the nation as a
whole or even for the world. And now we talk about forests being carbon repositories of carbon and therefore important in the context of climate change. So forests have multiple benefits. If local communities have to use forests, they will change the nature of forests. Forests in India have never been pristine. Local communities have always
used them and modified them. But there is a sharp difference between a modified forest and a completely deforested piece of land in terms of the environmental benefits that come from either a pristine or a modified forest versus the impacts that are completely barren or mine piece of land will have in terms of soil erosion, of course, the loss of biodiversity, loss of all the benefits for local communities, the loss of the carbon sequestered and so on.
Obviously one has to strike a balance between developmental needs and environmental needs. Perhaps 5000 years ago a much larger fraction of the the Indian peninsula was covered with forests as compared to today. So we have overtime reduced forest cover. The question now is we have reduced it already to 24% of the of the country. The real forest cover might be more like 1718%. Do we want to lose even those parts, especially the forests that are on slopes?
In the geologically sensitive Himalayas, harboring the what little biodacity that remains, or what little wildlife that remains, and still continuing to be important for local communities for their livelihoods, do we want to sacrifice what this what remains of this forest for the sake of projects whose developmental benefits need to be very carefully evaluated? Sharad Lili says the issue isn't really about whether development should happen or not.
The issue is what cost the development of progress comes at. So nobody denies that for instance a dam may have some mitigation benefits or a mine may have some benefits in terms of coal thermal power generation. Question is who benefits from that and who pays the cost and how much is that benefit that's actually trickling down and I think coal thermal power is a
really good example where the. Benefit goes to the industrialized economy, It goes to the urban centers who draw a huge amount of electricity for their air conditioning by the local Adivasi is not even getting six hours of electricity for a bulb that might be lighting their house, let alone anything else, right? So the benefits are distributed
extremely lopsidedly. And as we privatize mining, for instance, the profits from mining are much more going to the private sector, not even going into the national coffers. One need to question that the definition and the nature of development that is being promoted blindly and forests are seen as an obstacle to that development.
You've been critical of this scheme of a forestation, which is that you cut a forest and you plant one, say elsewhere to make up for it. Could you explain how successful such plans have been and why do you believe it's it's not as effective as we like to think it is? The idea of compensatory if a forestation was the feeling that, well, if we lost forests here at least we have gained it
elsewhere. It is flawed because after all if you lose a natural forest planting or usually a single species stand of eucalyptus or something or some fast growing species is not a replacement for the natural forest you lost.
It's not the same level of biodiversity, it's not giving the same level of soil conservation or the local benefits and so on. If you're decided that this particular project needs to go ahead, then the compensatory forestation is just a little bit of a salve to make you feel a little better that you haven't lost everything. The problem also comes in implementation. How do you implement compensatory forestation? For a long time, the compensatory plantation were not
being carried out. The court also looked at these issues at a later point in the 2000s. They found that the, you know, the money was collected for compensatory afforestation, but the actual planting didn't happen. There are additional problems that the planting happens on community lands, completely ignoring what communities are using those lands for. Maybe those are grazing lands, and in the process the forest department would notify that as forest and bring it under its
control. So the forest department would increase its estate through the method of compensatory afforestation and communities would lose access to. Common lands that they were using for grazing and other activities, and of course they were not consulted on diversion. They were not consulted on taking away their lands for compensatory afforestation either. So this is a problem in terms of the method through which both diversion takes place and compensatory afforestation takes
place. Sharad Leli says that a big issue now is the amendment to the rules in 2022, which says you can plant trees in a completely different place to compensate for forest land that you may be clearing. You have liberalized through the amendment last year to the forest conservation rules that in fact you can do compensatory afforestation anywhere in the country where anybody can go and
create a plantation. And then say this is now available for some company to offset or to show as their compensate afforestation project for the land that they are demanding from the forestry state. So the latest example was the Nicobar Island case, where the government is going to destroy. Really unique tropical nickelberry's forest and say that the compensatory first is going to happen in Haryana and there is no comparison between
these ecosystems, right. Whereas earlier there was at least a requirement that you do the compensatory forest station in the same district, Now even that possibility is kind of gone when you have anything can compensate for anything
anywhere. In addition to all the issues of monitoring whether it actually gets done, #1 and #2, the social issue of whether local communities land are being taken away in the name of compensate aforestation, are they being asked whether they're willing to let it go? None of that is happening. So that's like the largest set of issues around compensatory aforestation. One more thing you did flag is the aspect of Zoos and Safaris.
In forests, I wanted to understand why you would object to that Because for most urban dwellers, that is the idea of the jungle or a forest. Because we don't quite even understand when we are looking at a forest and when we are not. Why would you argue that it's a flaw to allow them in all forests? So let's separate zoos and safaris a little bit. Zoos are a very Western. Construct, which is now being very heavily questioned in the West. By the way, should you have zoos
at all? So the idea was that, well, you know, urban dwellers have no idea about the beauties of wildlife that is out there, whether it is zebras or giraffes and rhinos and tigers and so on, and they cannot otherwise see them anyway. So bring them and put them in cages and make them visible to city dwellers to see. The animals suffer a lot because of that, but keeping that aside for a moment. You can see that the idea of a zoo is to make wildlife visible to those who do not have access
to wildlife otherwise. So it's one thing to talk about setting up a zoo in the middle of the city of Delhi or whatever it is, Guwahati or somewhere where that the urban dweller can actually see some wildlife. Why would you want to set up a zoo inside forest land? If that forest contains wildlife? You go and try to see the wildlife. Get onto a Cantor or get into a Jeep and drive the game road and try to see the wildlife. If the forest doesn't contain wildlife, then what?
You're asking city dwellers to come all the way to the forest and then see some curated wildlife which doesn't exist in the natural forest. So it's kind of a false pretence. And that same argument extends to safari, where you people put people in well protected vehicles and then take them into an area. It's a very large caged enclosure, a very large enclosure. The animals are able to move around much more than they would do in a zoo.
But you're bringing animals from somewhere and keeping them in that enclosure. They're typically not local because if they were already tigers in that forest, you would say, well, set up a safari to go into the forest switching, basically go on the game roads, which is already happening. You don't need to do any further deforestation for that. A major justification for this act is to ensure that those living near or in forests also receive the benefits of economic
development. In this context, the Neem Giri case is an important one. The Niyamgiri case of Odisha was one of those cases that defined how forest dweller should decide the fate of the forest and the lands that they rely on. The Niyamgiri hill range was to be the site of a Vedanta refinery for bauxite, the compound from which the metal
aluminium can be extracted. The project was opposed by the 110 villages in the area, where 2 tribes believe that the hill is the residence of the God. After the project was blocked by the environment ministry since the forest residents did not clear it, the Supreme Court stepped in to say that it could only be cleared by the villages living around the proposed project. The villagers voted against the project and the court later rejected a proposal to have a
fresh vote there. At the time of the protest against the project, the agitation was compared to the Hollywood film Avatar, where a race of blue aliens seeks to protect their world from greedy humans. But such a case may not play out again. Sharad Lily explains how the rules have been steadily amended to ensure that local communities cannot easily block such projects in the future. One aspect that you mentioned a lot throughout is the forest dwellers and people who live
near forest. There are multiple issues that have been flagged Overtime. I have they got anything out of this new version of the law given it's been an issue now for over 30-40 years so. If one looks at the. Latest Forest Conservation Amendment Act 2023. It's not directly affecting forest dwellers rights and so on
directly. Earlier the Forest Conservation Act required that when you divert land, if communities have rights on those lands, then communities permission is required now because you have exempted a certain fraction, possibly 20% of the land from coming under the purview of the forest conservation. Act during diversion process, then, correspondingly, communities may not get asked at all. You know when the diversion
happens. Although technically, even if there was number Forest Conservation Act, once a community's rights are recognized on a piece of forest, somebody wants to divert that forest for whatever it might be. Obviously they should ask their community's permission, because the community is, in a sense, the de facto proprietor of that land unit, the technically the. Ownership rests with the state.
But the chances of that happening was strengthened if there was a FCA process in place which enshrined the FRA into the FCA. And this happened because of the Mgiri judgment and the earlier order passed by Jairam Ramesh in 2009 which said that since we now have a Forest Rights Act when communities get right on their forests, then if that forest has to be diverted, they need to be consulted. Overtime they diluted that 2017, they diluted it a little bit and
in 2022 last year. They in sense completely, almost completely eliminated by taking those sections out of the rules and just having one line saying the process of FRA etcetera will be done in parallel by the state government. So you will give permission here for diversion and then you are saying that the state government will do the FRA process in parallel. It makes absolutely no sense.
So the loss of the rights of the Community to assert that they control the forest and therefore their consent is required. That option I was lost last year itself, and this act further reduces that possibility by eliminating some lands from even coming under the ambit of any such process. But you're saying that essentially something like a neem giri cannot happen again? Absolutely, Yeah.
I should say that we must read this amended act in tandem with the amended rules of 2022 and see how they are all part of the same process of dilution the 2022 rules focused heavily on. In a sense getting rid of the community consent or creating space to bypass it a de facto plus they focus on this issue of accreditation. Any plantation anywhere can become a compensatory plantation and so on. That was the main 2 focuses of the amended rules.
And on top of that now you have an amended act which says that a Godavaram judgment needs to be quote UN quote fixed. It created too much ambiguity and then it goes on to do something which doesn't address the ambiguity anyway, it just gets rid of. The protection of the FCA to these de facto government owned forests that have, for whatever reason, been recorded in some other name.
In the end, Sharad Leli says the new amendment is just the latest push against safeguards that have already been weakened over the years. Given all of this is being done in the name of national security and development, he says we need to consider the cost it's coming at. This amendment for the weakens what was already weakened in the amendments to the rules last year.
It just makes it defect sort of de jure what was already happening de facto, which was that the forest clearance process hardly ever held up a project or hardly ever rejected a project. At best they might hold it up, ask for some changes here and there. So the clearance process was weak anyway and it's been dramatically weakened now. I think that's a larger question
of what does it mean? When our government is pushing the idea of national security and this very vague and fuzzy idea of development at the cost of environment so brutally, it's something we all need to ponder about. Today's episode was produced by Jayaraj Singh and Anuja Singh. For a daily spotlight on people, ideas and stories that matter, subscribe to us. We're available on Ty, Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, and all other platforms of your choice.
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