Amid the din and chaos in the Monsoon session of the Lok Sabha, the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Bill, 2023 was passed by the government. The act aims to overhaul the Forest (Conservation) Bill or FCA that was enacted in 1980. Sadly, for a bill of this importance and impact, there was barely any discussion except for a handful of parliamentarians raising a few notes of dissent. Within minutes of being tabled the bill was cleared, bringing it a step closer to becoming legislation.
The new set of changes proposed in the bill has generated a lot of debate and angst among activists, environmentalists, forest officials and so on. Right from the change of the title — the bill proposes to rename the Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 to “Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam“; to the addition of a preamble to the act that references India’s commitment to the Paris Agreement and different climate pacts. In effect, FCA is no more about just protecting India’s natural heritage, but also a conduit to meet our commitments on climate change.
While this might seem like a subtle or trivial shift; it certainly is not. To understand it, one must first start with the very basics — what is the purpose of a law? It is primarily a piece of legislation passed by relevant authorities to prescribe certain dos and don’ts. It spells out the rights of the citizens and also brings forth the duties. In many ways, laws are like the queue tapes that we see at the airports, they bring order and parity. More often than not, rules are didactic — spelling out what needs to be done, and proscribing penalties and punishments in case it is not. For instance, take the Wildlife Protection Act 1972, which forbids hunting or killing of animals inside national parks. In case, it is done, there are stiff punishments and penalties that the law prescribes.
The original Forest Conservation Act was also along the same lines, it set legal fences around the notified forests and prohibited any cutting, or felling of trees, without proper permission from the concerned authority. A big fillip to FCA came in 1996, in what is known as the Godavarman judgement by the Supreme Court, which completely changed the contours of the act, making it applicable to all forests in the records, or not, following the broader “dictionary” definition of forests. With the backing of the Supreme Court, FCA got the muscles to stall the degradation of forests. The effectiveness is reflected in the statistics. According to an Indian Express report, “about 41 lakh hectares of forest land were cleared for non-forest purposes between 1951 and 1976, govt data says. In the 43 years since the law, about 9.83 lakh hectares were diverted.” That is a good 3/4th less in more number of years.
The New Shift
But the recent amendments are aimed at resetting this connection. While presenting the bill in the Lok Sabha, the union minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav dubbed the new bill as progressive in its outlook. He went on to state that the amendment is necessary and crucial for meeting Net-Zero emissions and creating a carbon sink to sequester 2.5-3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030 under the Nationally Determined Contribution targets. Thus, the bill has a proactive outlook towards the environment and not just a protective one.
In light of these, the new amendments to FCA give incentives to private efforts by trying to define the limits of the 1996 judgement. So only the land parcels that are deemed to be ‘forest’ in any government record on or after 1980 would invoke provisions of the act. This essentially means that state governments can no longer classify unclassified land as forests, like the way Maharashtra government had earmarked nearly 600 acres in the Aarey forest in Mumbai as forest, under Section 4 of The Indian Forest Act, 1927. In addition, forest land up to 100 km near international borders, LAC, and so on, can be taken over without central approval, for “strategic and security” purposes. So, all the pristine forests in the north, in the Himalayan range can be razed, tunnelled or flattened for creating roads or rails for the sake of security. This is the very reason the hills in Uttarakhand are being tunnelled to set up rail lines for swifter movement of forces near the border with China.
In addition, the new amendments exempt from seeking prior forest clearance, strip forests (up to 0.10 hectares or ha) situated alongside a rail line or a public road maintained by the government; tree plantations on private lands that are not categorised as forests; up to 5 ha area proposed to be used for construction of defence related or public utility projects in a Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected area.
One of the grouses of the government is that due to the Godavarman ruling, private entities have been wary to plant trees on private pieces of land, lest it is dubbed as forest land. Hence, there are not many private timber, teak or bamboo plantations that can be commercially exploited. The new amendment will allow that, not only to use of private parcels for compensatory afforestation but also for commercial exploitation.
“Compensatory afforestation is essential for carbon sink… The bill will prove to be a milestone. We want to encourage afforestation on private land. Also, this would help in addressing development issues in Left-wing extremism-affected areas. The tribals are waiting for roads and health facilities. This will help us in achieving this,” stated the minister, according to a story in ET.
Back in the British Time
Oddly, the actions of the current government are reminiscent of how the British colonist encroached on Indian forest. The Indian Forest Act was first enacted in 1865. It was subsequently amended in 1878 and 1927. Yet, this act was not crafted to protect or safeguard forests but to control the natural resources for the extraction of timber from the forests. It was not as if, forests were being culled before the Britishers and they helped protect it. Prof Madhav Gadgil in one of his books states that community forestry played a very significant role in saving the forests. The villagers that lived in the vicinity of the forests were usually the guardians of them, as their subsistence depended on it. The Britishers changed the system so that the people living in and around the forests would not be able to object to indiscriminate exploitation for timber and teak (for railway sleepers and ships). And this led to a disconnect between the man and the forest.
Coming back to the present times and the current government. This isn’t the first assault on “environment” per se. Just a few days before the passage of the FCA amendments, the government sailed away by bringing through the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Bill, 2023 by a voice vote in the Lok Sabha. In this law too, the government seeks to decriminalise biodiversity offences and replace them with penalties. Yet, again, the amendments were passed in minutes.
The sad part is that all these legislations are getting passed without any sort of opposition. The political parties sitting on the other side of the Treasury Benches seem more interested in cornering the government on one political issue or the other. In the meantime, the government lists the bills and passes them due to its brute majority. As a result, the bills are passed without any significant opposition or discussion. This is a tragedy, because as a report in Outlook stated, there were many public objections to these amendments, when the government circulated the proposal note on the Bill in October 2021 for public comments, with as many as 5,000 responses. According to one report, there are 1,70,000 villages in India, in which more than 200 million tribals and aboriginals reside. These people have their land rights on 85.6 million acres of land under the Forest Rights Act of 2006. As per the new amendments, an area of land can be exempted from the legal framework for the quick accomplishment of any political- and security-related projects that are of national interest. This essential means that the village council will not have a say on any activities that can be carried out on the community forests as per the FRA.
In the end, it is silly to mistake a group of trees for forests. While forests are indeed made up of trees, it is not trees alone that make up a forest. Just by planting a thousand trees on a plot of land, one can’t create a forest. A forest once destroyed through an act of man, be it for mining, a hydroelectric project or even a metro, cannot be compensated by a plantation elsewhere. The landslides in the Himalayan region are an indicator of this faulty thought process. With Climate Change turning into a climate crisis, we don’t have the privilege of time to be experimental. There’s no Plan B, as they say…
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