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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

No tree for a tree -Pradip Krishen
-The Indian Express

Loss of mature trees cannot be made up by planting new ones. Forest Department shows how not to grow a forest.

In the spontaneous protests that have erupted in Delhi over the felling of over 16,000 trees in government redevelopment yards, the response from the authorities seems to be: The numbers are exaggerated and, in any case, we’ll plant more trees than are being felled.

In a city with the most noxious air quality in the world, one would have thought that planners and politicians would strain every nerve and sinew to curb new development that adversely impacts Delhi’s air. In such a scenario, the numbers game is academic. It’s just as deplorable whether 11,000 or 16,000 trees are being chopped down.

But it’s the response that says, “In any case, we’ll plant more trees”, that I’d like to examine more closely: The entrenched notion that it’s feasible to compensate for the loss of mature trees by planting new ones. In India’s countryside, compensation for the diversion of forest land for “non-forest purposes” has been implemented through a series of laws that go back to the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, laws which have been tweaked a few times to try and make them more effective. At the heart of the matter lies the issue of whether it’s possible to make truly effective redress for cutting down a swathe of natural wilderness.

The policy culminated in the Compensatory Afforestion Fund (CAF) Act of 2016 and rests firmly on the assumption that it is possible to make effective redress by planting large numbers of trees on previously non-forested land. Compensation is reduced to a matter of counting trees.

It would be hard to find ecologists who would agree. An old forest is a whole lot more than the sum of its trees. How do you recreate a community of plants, fungi, microbes, insects and animals that are all part of a living jungle ecosystem? How many decades might it take? And how do you call into being a soil teeming with microorganisms and mycorrhiza that inhabit the humus that has taken 30,000 years to build up?

Such fundamental questions are awkward enough but consider this: The sole agency entrusted with carrying out compensatory afforestation is the Indian Forest Department. It is a bald and striking fact that no Forest Department in India has any experience or track record of doing any ecological restoration work of any kind. It is not part of the Department’s brief, has never been part of its historical role, and is not taught to foresters in their training. So to expect the Forest Department to achieve any kind of afforestation that is even remotely akin to a natural wilderness is like baying at the moon.

I practise a form of small-scale ecological restoration myself that I call “rewilding”, and it would be contrary if I suggested in any way that “rewilding” cannot be achieved. It can. But it needs tools and knowledge and techniques and, above all, a mindset that India’s Forest Departments do not possess, which is tragic, because it means that compensatory afforestation is doomed to remain an exercise in futility. It means that whenever forest land is acquired through due process for non-forest use, we will end up with compensatory afforestation that exists only on paper and with a net loss of forest in practice.

In a city like Delhi, the Forest Department must be thoroughly confused about what role to play in the centre of power and with so many horticultural agencies competing for its natural turf. The Forest Department plays little role in managing the green areas of Delhi, not even the Central Ridge, which is nominally under its control. But when it comes to compensatory afforestation, it is the Forest Department which implements the planting schemes and is charged with compliance under the CAF Act.

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