-Scroll.in It is important that forest policies are formulated through a gender-sensitive lens and that women are included in the conversation. A few weeks ago, when Google India marked the 45th anniversary of the Chipko movement with a doodle, it was a refreshing flashback to forest communities sacrificing their lives to protect trees from being felled for timber use. One of the first such recorded community protests was at Khejarli village in...

-Groundxero.in India’s forests are officially on sale. Forests, which are ecological and cultural constructs intrinsically linked with human communities that have been living in and using those for ages, have turned into mere repositories of ‘products’ such as timber and ‘ecosystem services’ that could be quantified, valued, priced and exchanged—or so the Draft National Forest Policy prepared by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change(MoEF & CC) would have us...

-Livemint.com The current National Forest Policy dates back to 1988 before India’s economic liberalization started and now the government wants a revision, as it perceives a decline in corporate investments into the forest sector New Delhi: Imagine two scenarios. One is a natural forest, nature’s complex multi-layered ecosystem and a landscaped home to 80% of all terrestrial biodiversity where thousands of species of plants, animals and microorganisms interact and thrive. The second...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...

-Scroll.in The existing policy bans commercial activity in natural forests to protect forest dwellers. The new draft policy is up for public comments till April 14. The Union government has drafted a new National Forest Policy. If approved, the policy will allow the corporate sector to grow, harvest and sell trees on government-owned forest lands. So far, this is explicitly banned under the existing National Forest Policy, which was laid down...