CB BureauThe Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has sought Rs 462 crore in its budgetary allocation for improving the forest cover in India by five million hectares over the next 10 years as part of the Green India Mission. This is a substantial increase from the Rs 4 crore allocated in 2012″13. The mission had taken off in 2011 with an initial fund of Rs 100 crore.
In a bid to generate its own resources, the MoEF has also moved the Supreme Court to draw money from its compensatory afforestation fund, a corpus collected from user agencies towards compensatory afforestation, penal compensatory afforestation, net present value of forest land diverted and so on. The fund has Rs 25,000 crore and is managed by the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA).
As per SC guidelines of 2009, funds up to Rs 1,000 crore can be given to state CAMPA.
The Green India Mission aims to improve forest cover so that by 2020 India’s forests are able to capture 50 to 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, offsetting about six per cent of total emissions. On paper, the mission focuses on improvement of ecosystem services including biodiversity, hydrological services and carbon sequestration, while also aiming to increase forest-based livelihood incomes for three million families. India currently has about 70 million hectares under forests but about 40 per cent of this is degraded or bad-quality forests.
Zero rejection of hydroelectric projects in last 6 years
According to an analysis by the NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People (SANDRAP), the expert appraisal committee (EAC) on river valley and hydroelectric projects (RVPs) under MoEF considered a total of 262 hydropower and irrigation projects from April 2007 to December 2012, and did not reject a single project during that period.
The analysis is based on information under RTI and minutes of 63 meetings of the earlier EAC, and shows it has not rejected a single project so far. In case of two projects that it declined to recommend clearance, it basically asked the developers to come back with reformulated proposals. It is now being said that the EAC has never rejected any environmental impact analysis (EIA) done by project developers, or asked for fresh public hearings, even when given evidence of serious deficiencies in the EIA or the public hearing process. ‘It seems the committee is actually an expert approval committee, since it seems to have expertise in approving rather than appraising the projects objectively,’ Himanshu Thakkar, convener of SANDRAP, said.
In less than six years, EAC recommended terms of reference (TOR) clearance of Stage-I for hydropower projects proposed with installed capacity of 49,458MW. It also recommended final environmental clearance (EC) for hydropower capacity of 16,084MW. EAC gave TOR for 3.28 million hectares of cultivable command area (CCA) and EC for 1.59 million hectares. SANDRAP says since 1991-92, there has been no addition to the net area irrigated by major and medium irrigation projects at national level as per official figures.
Picture: Munar’s landscape