Parts of the Aravalli Range, which are the unofficial green lungs of Delhi, and countless other green oases that do the duty of a forest without the official tag of a forest have become sitting ducks to the Union government’s recent amendments to the Forest Conservation Act.
The Act was meant to protect forests of all kinds. But the Modi government’s amendment to the Forest Act, limiting the law’s protection only to officially designated forest areas, has now exposed large swathes of potential forestland to easy exploitation.
Haryana’s Aravalli forests bordering Delhi, which are yet to be notified as a forest, lose their legal protection under the Act, and stand vulnerable to being snapped up by real estate developers.
The amendments disregard the Supreme Court’s famous TN Godavarman case order. In 1996, the court gave an order that re-emphasised what lands would be protected as forests under the forest conservation law. Under it, whether the government recognised a forest patch as one or not on its records, if it was a forest, it would be protected regardless of who owned the forest patch. This became necessary because government records of forests have always been fuzzy, contradictory and incomplete.
The blame also majorly lies with the states, as the court had tasked them with identifying and marking forest patches that had been overlooked in official records so that they were brought under the ambit of the law and protected. These unpublished internal documents of the Union environment ministry, although dated, reveal that as of 2014—eighteen years after the Supreme Court's directive—most states including Haryana, Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra had made little progress in identifying and safeguarding these vital forests.
Read the concluding part of the #ForestsForProfit series by Tapasya and Nitin Sethi which delves into the impending loss of India's green lungs due to the changes to forest law.