3. The Indian Scenario
3.0 Introduction
Land is the solid cover of the earth. It is a non-renewable
finite natural resource to be used by human beings for all its purposes, essentials
and extras of life. Land provides human race space to grow food, to construct
buildings for living, setting industries, educational medical recreational and
all other facilities. The users of land are growing at a rate of about 2% per
year. New additions of land, if any, in the form of delta or by addition of meteorites
can in no way be considered to be commensurate with the population growth. Thus
land is already a scarce resource, and is getting more scarce day by day. The
problem is more severe in India which holds more than 16% of global population
in only 2.3% of global land area. Here per capita availability of usable land
is even less than 0.3 ha. Hence, more and more land, which were previously not
under human use, are being used for human purposes. This is disturbing the natural
ecosystem and hence the other environmental attributes on which depends the existence
and well being of human community.
3.1 Legal provisions
Greenery has got the potentiality to safequard or improve
the quality of land and almost all other environmental attributes. Men has learnt
this and hence realised the requirement of keeping green cover on a large portion
of land.
The first official record of realisation in India about the need for preserving
forest cover is the country's National Forest Policy of 1894. The policy had the
following broad objectives:
1. The basic objective for maintaining forest cover was to preserve climatic and
physical conditions of the country.
2. Other objectives were for supplying valuable timber for commercial purposes,
fulfilling the forest based needs of the local people and for providing pasture
land.
3. As per the statement, permanent cultivation received precedence over forestry.
Presently considered important issues like forestry research and training, forest
conservation, wildlife management, catchment management etc. did not find place
in the policy statement.
National forest policy, 1952
With the attainment of independence, priorities of National
Government also needed revision to fulfil the aspiration of people in changed
context. This included revision of Forest Policy. With this in view, GoI constituted
Central Board of Forestry (CBF) in 1950. The first National Forest Policy for
Independent India, formulated by CBF was announced in 1952. The policy laid down
the following broad objectives.
i. Classification of forests according to their primary functions.
ii. Forests are valuable both in the physical field such as prevention of soil
erosion, conservation of moisture and in the economic field of development of
agriculture, industry and communication.
iii. Regularization of uncontrolled and excessive grazing to ward off its ill
effects on the forests.
iv. Evaluation of a system of balanced and complementary land use to produce the
most and deterioration the least.
v. Discourage extention of arable land from the forests.
vi. Cover one-third of total geographical area with forests, 60 percent in hilly
regions and 20 percent in the plairs.
vii. Functional classification of forest viz. "Protection Forest", "National Forests"
and "Village Forests".
Forest Conservation and Protection activities during the successive five year
development plans were drawn in line with the new forest policy. Activities which
received attention during subsequent five year plans are listed below:
Second five year plan
* Economic plantation on forest lands including plantation
of commercially and industrially valuable species.
* Construction of forest roads.
* Establishment of wild life sanctuaries.
Third five year plan
* Large scale plantation of first growing species to attain
self sufficiency in industrial timbers, fuel wood and other forest products.
Fourth five year plan
The forestry sector was planned with following objectives:
* Increase the productivity of the forests
* Link up forest development with forest-based industries.
*Develop forests as a support to rural economy.
Fifth five year plan
* Creation of large scale man made forests.
* Improvement of degraded forests.
* Development of farm forestry.
* Development of National Park, Launching of Project Tiger.
Sixth five year plan.
* Major thrust was on saving natural forests
Seventh five year plan
The seventh plan envisaged "Forests for survival" as its
theme as regards to forest management. The plan gave highest priority to restore
the forest cover on 33% of the geographical area of the country bringing under
forests from existing level of 23%.
It was observed that inspite of the National Forest Policy of 1952 indicating
clearly about "keeping one third of the total land area under forest", extensive
diversion of forest land for non-forest purposes took place over the years. It
could be inferred from the available information that the total forest area diverted
for non-forest purposes between 1952 and 1980 was 4.5 million ha, i.e. at a rate
of 0.15 million ha per year. In order to abate such diversion, the constitution
was amended in 1976 (Forty Second Amendment) which inscribed "forests" under a
new item 17A in the concerned list of the Seventh Schedule to the constitution.
Following this was the Forty second Constitution Amendment Act of 1976 which introduced
Article 48A for protection and improvement of environment and safeguarding of
forests and wildlife. This was followed by the UN Conference on human environment,
held at stockholm on 5th June, 1972. Subsequently the Forest (Conservation) Act
was enacted in 1980 as a long felt measure to protect and conserve forests. The
current rate of diversion of forest for non-forestry purposes is about 20,000
ha/annum (Anon, 2001, pp. IV-3).
The Environment Protection Act 1986 defines "environment" to include water, air,
land and interrelationship between these and human beings, other living creatures,
plants micro-organisms and property. This records the importance of land and the
green cover on land. The Central Government is empowered by the act to frame rules
for environmental protection.
The National Forest Policy, 1988, set by the GoI, MoEF, New Delhi mentions that
the National goal should be to have a minimum of one-third of the total land area
of the country under forest or tree cover. In the hills and in mountainous regions,
the aim should be to maintain two-third of the area under such cover in order
to prevent erosion and land degradation and to ensure the stability of the fragile
eco-system.
In the World Environment day 1999 the Hon'ble Prime Ministry of India, Shri Atal
Behari Bajpayee reiterated certain policy initiatives, in which the first one
was a strategy to achieve 33% forest cover in the country
In the Indian Constitution the citizens have direct access to the Hon'ble Supreme
Court to ventilate environmental grievances as they are now deemed to be fundamental
rights violations. Probably the best example for this in the field of mining is
the case of limestone mining in Doon valley where mining on hill slopes was disturbing
the surrounding LU so seriously that the people around had lodged a complain to
the Hon'ble Supreme Court, and could get stay-order.