ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Elections Bad News for Forests

By Keya Acharya Reprint | | Print |

Keya Acharya

BANGALORE, India, Mar 22 2004 (IPS) - Legitimising encroachments into forest lands before the elections is a cheap way to win votes, but one that could prove costly for India’s rapidly dwindling green cover, as well the country’s tribal communities.

The latest round of ‘regularisations’ of encroachments up to December 1993, ordered by the ruling, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in February, obviously with an eye to general elections in April, may cause irreversible damage to forest lands, say critics here.

Both government and private parties have long been going into forest lands, mainly to open them up for agriculture.

The agriculture ministry’s records show that 700,00 hectares have been converted from forest to agricultural uses between the early 50s and the 70s. Another 4.3 million hectares were ‘diverted’ from 1951 to 1980, more than half of it for agriculture. The Forest Conservation Act, passed in 1980, barred all further conversion of forests.

Officially, 19 percent of India’s geographic area is under forests, with 11 percent categorised as ‘dense’, though experts say the actual coverage is far less.

Illegal encroachments by a powerful lobby of ”influential persons with political affiliations”, as the country’s apex Supreme Court described them in a court order last year, continues to eat away the forests.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests in 2003 described India’s 1.25 million hectares of encroachments as ‘under-reported’.

In spite of clear rules in the Forest Act, federal and central government administrations have been unable to prevent encroachments. Political interference has in turn hampered forest officials from taking action against ‘bigwig’ offenders.

In 2003, the Supreme Court, in response to a petition against forest encroachments in six federal States, ordered the eviction of encroachments made after 1980, in accordance with India’s Forest Conservation Act.

But that decision created another problem. It threatened to displace 10 million tribals, especially those living in lands ambiguously called ‘forests’ and belonging to the revenue department in various states – land that the court ordered to be given back to the forest department.

The ministry’s subsequent eviction order brought widespread protests, prompting it to clarify that tribal communities living on lands prior to 1980 would not be affected.

While the issue has pitted India’s wildlife ‘greens’ and forest officials against non-government organisations and tribal leaders, smallholder individuals rather than tribals are more the offenders when it comes to encroaching into and converting agricultural land, experts say.

”Genuine tribals can never benefit from such populist measures, so the court’s stay on the ministry’s orders for regularisation of encroachments was probably good,” says well-known forestry management commentator Madhu Sarin.

” Unfortunately”, continues Sarin, ”the whole issue of unsettled claims by tribals has become enmeshed in complex administrative and legal tangles.”

But various governments have conveniently used the sensitive issue of ‘protecting’ tribals from being uprooted as a reason for inaction on the encroachment by other parties. In truth, forest officials say, the majority of small-scale encroachers are non-tribals whose votes matter.

”We are not evicting tribals, even from national parks”, says Karnataka state’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (wildlife) Ram Mohan Ray, ” but we won’t allow individuals to conduct commercial activity on forest lands”.

In central Madhya Pradesh state, home to majority of the country’s tribal communities, the government recently sought to legitimatise nearly 200,000 hectares of forest lands out of 400,000 hectares previously recorded as encroached.

The government in the eastern State of Tripura has similarly sought to convert around 14,539 hectares of forest land.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests in New Delhi allowed both these states’ petitions, along with its own decision to regularise all encroachments until 1993, in a circular dated Feb. 5, 2004.

The court reacted swiftly to these pre-election moves of the BJP-led government by ordering a three-month stay on decisions by state and central governments to legitimise all encroachments – effectively meaning that no much moves can be done until after the elections.

”It is strange that for diversion of forest land for public purposes like building dams etcetera, the government had been approaching the court regularly but not in this case,” the Bench commented.

India’s politically powerful however have found ways to evade the court’s orders. Other than one case in Karnataka where the chairman of the Legislative Council, B L Shankar, was forced to relinquish usurped land, no significant evictions of the powerful have happened yet.

In Karnataka where 95,952 hectares of forests are recorded as having been converted into other purposes after 1978, the ruling Congress Party evaded the Supreme Court order by appointing 42 district-level or rural committees to ”discuss” the issue.

NGOs connected with tribal rehabilitation and forest lands based in Dharwad district had no knowledge of the government order, like wildlife groups in Chikmagalur, Shimoga and Bangalore. The state’s department of forests, ecology and environment were not consulted in the appointment of the committee members.

But Karnataka’s Forest Minister K H Ranganath denied that the move has anything to do with the coming elections. ”The decision to form ‘taluk’ (local level) committees was taken by the Assembly to give all those individuals – who have forest lands prior to 1980 and are not in the records – to be identified.”

Ranganath also disputed claims that committee members had links to the ruling Congress party. ”These members are local people who will be best able to identify local individuals correctly.”