Seeing Wilderness Everywhere: The Cure Is Finally in Visible

As per the Forest Conservation Act, it is necessary to obtain approval from the state authorities and the Center before starting any non-forest activity on any land notified as ‘forest’. Even minor requests, such as to build an access road from one’s private premises to a public road, must obtain signatures from eight officials spread across local, state and central administration.

This forest-clearing clearance is one of the most difficult permits to obtain in India, sometimes requiring a wait of up to 365 days, and, reportedly, often requiring lakhs of rupees in bribes. Applicants range from local forest officials to forest ‘experts’ sitting in Delhi’s lush green Jor Bagh area. Incidentally, if one looks at the map around the Environment Building, some areas are marked as dense forest land. It is not clear whether concessions were given to get forest-clearance approval for the same.

The central government is trying to rectify the consequential mistakes made by the judiciary in the Godavarman case in defining the scope of forest laws in India. Holding that the Act would apply to all pieces of land recorded as forest land in any government record, the court’s decision defied common sense discussion of whether a piece of land was in fact a forest or a fragile ecosystem. Seeing the woods everywhere has resulted in some pretty absurd results.

It is forgotten that the state of land records in India is appalling – a parcel demarcated as forest in one government record may be classified differently in another. Then the landowners have to face serious consequences; Once classified as forest, it is very difficult to bring a piece of land to any use, and especially impossible for certain types of use (building houses, for example). A national daily recently found that the Reserve Bank of India and much of Lutyens’ Delhi have been built on land recorded as ‘forest land’. Inconsistencies in land records have also negatively impacted businesses – around 30 resorts in Karnataka were recently caught in a crossfire between the state revenue and forest departments, which could not decide whether the land used by these resorts was forest land or not.

To make matters worse, the court order was worded in such a way that it prevented states from reclassifying even those pieces of land that didn’t pass the smell test of being wilderness. For example, several states notified all footpaths as ‘strip forest’ decades before the Forest Conservation Act came into force. While the earlier effects of such notifications were minor, the implementation of the court order meant that people would have to knock on the doors of Paryavaran Bhavan if they wanted to build an access road to their property.

Today, the main reason people apply for forest-clearance approvals is to build link roads. To put it in detail, 67.5% of all requests for forest clearance in Punjab are for pathways. The typical application for the construction of a road sought permission to use only 0.012 hectares of roadside land.

Finally, the order also undermined property rights by restricting the use of private land. As per the order, the Forest Conservation Act was also to apply to all tracts of land meeting the dictionary definition of the word ‘forest’. The implication is that this would also apply to privately owned land. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, builders were prevented from constructing residential buildings on land owned by them because it was deemed that the land met the dictionary definition of ‘forest land’.

The Parliament of India has a moral duty to take note of the worst consequences of the 1996 order of the Supreme Court. Firstly, the Parliament should have clearly defined the definition of forest in the original law. The Supreme Court took an obscure law, expanded it dramatically, and closed the door on any course-correction that might have been felt necessary with experience.

Today the Parliament is trying to rectify this series of mistakes. To achieve this, the amendment bill was examined and recently endorsed by a 31-member Joint Parliamentary Committee. This special effort of the government should be supported.

It is right for environmentalists to tell us to respect and care for our natural heritage, but surely, we should call spade a spade and only a forest a forest?

The sad saga of forests being witnessed everywhere should also serve as a cautionary tale of policy making being taken over by the courts rather than remaining in the domain of the legislature or the executive.

For nearly three decades, the good faith action by the courts resulted in paralysis that frontline officials could not recover from. This promoted a different type of centralisation, and prevented any favorable response by local and state governments.

Everyone knew that the emperor wore no clothes, but no one could uncover it. It is time we do something for our forests and the land that is not a forest.

Updated: July 20, 2023, 08:45 PM IST