Daft National Forest Policy 2018?

On World Environment Day 2018 Lakshmy Raman and Bittu Sahgal ask that politicians, planners, activists and scientists join hands with long-suffering citizens to tackle the conjoined problems of biodiversity loss, climate change and the falling quality of human life on the subcontinent. With over 90 per cent of the accessible water available to over a billion humans being sourced from, fi ltered through, or fed by sources originating in natural ecosystems including wetlands and forests, the authors have chosen to focus on the most immediate threat to natural India by way of the poorly-drafted, irresponsibly-posited Draft National Forest Policy 2018 for India.

India will be the global host for World Environment Day, June 5, 2018. Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, said: “Indian philosophy and lifestyle has long been rooted in the concept of co-existence with nature. We are committed to making Planet Earth a cleaner and greener place.”

It’s true. Indians are truly rooted in an ethos of living in harmony with their land. There was a time when the Indian subcontinent was carpeted in green… watered by glacial rivers, blessed by rolling hills and productive grasslands, lush rainforests and wave-kissed mangroves. All creatures, great and small, found niches here and thrived. Varied cultures were spawned and people in awe of nature lived by its rules.

This happy situation has changed. The wondrous green has long-disappeared – plundered and looted first by invaders and colonists and then by those who took freedom as license to outdo the colonisers in the plunder of natural India. Today what little remains is being systematically eroded by a population caught in the crossroads of a development paradigm borrowed from the industrial North that systematically devastated colonies for centuries.

It is to feed this consumerist nirvana that illogical developmental plans such as the recently-announced Draft National Forest Policy was born.

India’s natural wealth feeds, clothes and sustains our people in the most democratic way imaginable. Today our government wishes to centralise control of resources including forests, rivers, lakes, wetlands, grasslands and coasts for short-term gains. Already marginalised segments of our population are about to be pauperised by cronies of those in power to the point where the very viability of the subcontinent is at risk.

GOING, GOING, GONE