Patchy growth

Forests and trees now cover one-quarter of India's geography. But this is not necessarily good news

- KIRAN PANDEY AND SHUCHITA JHA, NEW DELHI

INDIA HAS increased its forest cover by an area roughly twice the size of Delhi in the past two years, suggests the India State of Forest Report 2021, released on January 13, 2022, by the Forest Survey of India (FSI). As a result the country’s forest and tree cover has risen to 809,537 sq km or 24.62 per cent of total land area. While releasing the report, Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav claimed that his government has not only increased the forest cover but qualitatively enriched it. A closer look at the report’s findings, though, suggests that there is not much to celebrate.

First, this marginal increase still falls far short of what is needed to meet national and global targets. According to the National Forest Policy, 1988, the country must have 33 per cent of its geographical area under forest and tree cover. The same has been listed as an indicator under the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 (Life on land) as well as the “Strategy for New India@75” released by government think tank NITI Aayog in December 2018, with 2030 as the deadline. In fact, an analysis of forest and tree cover trends from 1987, when the first FSI report was released, to 2021 shows that in 34 years, the cover as share of its geographical area has risen by just 5 percentage points.

Progress in 2011-21 has been awfully slow at just 0.81 percentage points (see 'Marginal rise'). As per the 2021 report, only 17 states and Union Territories have forests covering more than 33 per cent of their geographical area, of which five have over 75 per cent.