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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

25/02/24 20:42 PM IST

Supreme Court’s interim order on the Forest Act

In News
  • The Supreme Court ordered the government to continue following the all-encompassing “dictionary meaning” of forest as upheld in a 1996 Supreme Court decision in the T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad case till a final verdict is handed out.
Forest conservation act
  • The Forest Conservation Act, which came into force in 1980, was conceived to stop the razing of forests.
  • An estimated four million hectares of forest land had been diverted from 1951-75 and once the Act came into force, the average annual rate of diversion dropped to about 22,000 hectares — or about a tenth — going by figures cited by the Centre to a parliamentary panel to demonstrate the effectiveness of the legislation.
  • The provisions of this legislation predominantly applied to tracts of forest land recognised as such by the Indian Forest Act, or by States in their records since 1980.
  • Illegal timber-felling at Gudalur in Tamil Nadu led the Supreme Court to deliver the landmark Godavarman Thirumulpadjudgment in 1996. It decreed that forests had to be protected irrespective of how they were classified and who owned them.
  • Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, for instance, define a forest as a tract that spans a minimum of 10 hectares, is covered with naturally growing timber, fuel wood and yielding trees and, has a density of 200 trees or more per hectare.
  • Goa defines a forest as a patch of land having at least 75% covered with forest species.
  • Some States have no parameters at all. Because of varying definitions of deemed forest, estimates of their territorial spread in India range from 1% - 28% of India’s official forest area of 80 million ha.
  • The Centre’s recent attempt to amend the Forest Conservation Act was ostensibly to bring “clarity” as there were large tracts of recorded-forest land that had already been legally put to non-forestry uses, but conformed to a State’s criteria of a ‘deemed forest.’
  • India’s ambitions to create a carbon sink of 2.5-3 billion tonnes, to meet its net-zero goals required forest laws to be “dynamic”, and the rules sought to remove ‘deemed forest,’ not already recorded as such, from the ambit of protection.
Amendment
  • Forest land situated within a distance of 100 kilometres along international borders or the Line of Control or Line of Actual Control, and which needed to be cleared to construct strategic linear projects of national importance would also be exempt from the Act.
  • Any ten hectares in a forest, regarded necessary for use in constructing security related infrastructure or five hectares in forest land affected by ‘left wing extremism’ too would be bereft of protection.
  • The government rationale is that these exemptions are necessary to facilitate basic infrastructure in tribal areas.
Implications of the SC's Order
  • The Supreme Court’s interim order implies that forests will continue to be governed as if the recent amendments of the Centre didn’t exist.
  • Most importantly, it said that States should provide and the Centre publish, reports by State-constituted expert committees on the extent of deemed forests within their territories.
  • It also struck down schemes to constitute zoos and safari parks on forest land.
Source- The Hindu

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