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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

When You Green a Desert, You Invite Locust Swarms -Ninad Avinash Mungi, Neeraj Mahar and Sutirtha Lahiri

-The Wire Science

NASA released a satellite image last year showing that India, with China, is “greening the world”. The greening has been thanks to the colonial ideologies that have bequeathed the legacy of greening India, which has been upheld by the subsequent governments. The British drafted the first National Forest Policy for India to convert its forests into timber production stands. Decades later, the Indian government safeguarded these stands with an idea of conserving this natural heritage and amended the pertaining policies.

No doubt, Indian forests are relatively better protected than forests of other developing tropical countries. But while doing so, it was only the ‘green’ that was identified as a natural synonym of our natural heritage and as a result, only the forested areas were protected.

Deserts, dry lands, barren lands and all that isn’t classified as ‘green’, were, and often are, discriminated against for not being ‘natural’ enough. This discrimination is reflected in naive human modifications of greening deserts and converting the ‘fallow lands’ into productive ones.

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