BLACK GOLD AND GREEN SIGNAL Anubhuti Vishnoi Friday, August 29, 2014 Half of Indias forests, literally no-go areas for industry, will be opened up for coal mining. This is the first major step in the elaborate blueprint for change in the countrys environment policies that the Narendra Modi Government plans to roll out fast. The message to the environment ministry is clear-facilitate, mediate, but dont obstruct. Prakash Javadekar, the man incharge at Paryavaran Bhawan, got this message when he was hardly paying attention to the portfolio in his first month as minister. He was rarely seen in the ministry, files remained pending for weeks, officials had no clear directions, committees were not constituted and it seemed almost rudderless. He once remarked in the corridors of Parliament that he did not like going to the environment ministry because NGOs and lobbyists hound him. The Prime Ministers Office (PMO) was not impressed. And in due course, Javadekar, the information and broadcasting minister, was reminded, rather effectively, that he is also the countrys environment minister. That was in mid-August and the turnaround since has been remarkable. Violating inviolate The controversial go, no-go forest area concept introduced by Jairam Ramesh as environment minister in 2010 is the first policy set for reinterpretation, a move that will open up huge swathes of forest land for mining-half the no-go areas to be precise. Coal is a mineral on priority but the environment ministry has asked for detailed mapping of forest land bearing iron ore and manganese so that mining of these can also be streamlined. The big policy move is expected to flow from a declaration very soon that will specify just how much of Indias forested area is inviolate-essentially, forests that are hundreds of years old, housing rich biodiversity and cannot be regenerated or reclaimed by human effort. INDIA TODAY has learnt that the Forest Survey of India (FSI), at the instance of the environment ministry, has assessed that while 30 per cent of coal-bearing forest land was made out of bounds by the go, no-go concept, the new inviolate-violate formulation would bring this area down by half or roughly 15-17 per cent. The FSI is believed to have suggested that only pristine forests would largely qualify as inviolate under the new formulation, which means not more than 6 per cent of Indias geographical area. The trick behind the change is the tweaking of criteria which defines the inviolate category. A 2012 committee under former environment secretary T. Chatterjee-tasked to formulate objective parameters for identification of inviolate forest areas-had come up with six measurable parameters to make this assessment. These were: forest type, biological richness, wildlife value, forest cover, landscape integrity and hydrological value. But soon after the Modi Government took charge, the environment ministry decided to reduce the number of parameters to four-wildlife value was proposed to be clubbed with biological richness and hydrological value with forest cover as these parameters were thought to be overlapping. The rationalising of parameters was done based on inputs from stakeholder ministries-the coal ministry was one of the first to voice its concerns over the committees report. To identify such areas, the report had suggested dividing the whole country into one square km grids and scoring each grid on the six parameters. If the average score of a grid exceeds 70 out of 100, it shall be labelled inviolate and if a majority of the grids in a mining block are inviolate, the block too will be labelled as such. But the area has come down drastically when measured against the four broader categories due to the rationalised calculation. m.indiatoday.in/story/forest-land-will-soon-be-open-for-mining-jairam-ramesh-prakash-javadekar/1/379703.html
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 11:40:50 +0000
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