25.87 MILLION HECTARES

That is the size of forest missing from the latest assessment of India's green cover. Does this land exist? Is it encroached upon? Or is it just degraded; so degraded that there are no forests to be counted here?

- SUNITA NARAIN

Some four decades ago, in the mid-1980s, the National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad, prepared a report on India's forest cover using satellite imagery. The report compared the forest cover between 1972-75 and 1980-82, and found that the country had lost 1.3 million hectares (ha) of forests every year in this seven-year period. This estimate was way higher than what was projected each year by the forest department, and shocked the country. For the first time, there was a visual overview of the state of forest cover from the sky, which had shown a decline. It spurred action and kick-started conservation and afforestation in the country. Soon, the Forest Survey of India (FSI), Dehradun, was tasked with producing an assessment of the country's forest wealth every two years.

Such a report is critical because it reflects the health of forests, which is crucial for livelihood, economic growth and carbon sequestration in that order—for a country like India. The bulk of the country's forests are the habitat of its poorest people.

Since 1988, when fsi produced the first “State of Forest Report 1987”, the capability of satellites and of interpretation of forests has improved substantially, but the same is not the case with the state of the country's forest cover. Let me explain this.