India has lost 1,488 square kilometres (sq km) of ‘unclassed forests’, an analysis of data from the State of Forest Report (SOFR) 2023 has revealed.
‘Unclassed forests’ are non-notified forests under government ownership, mainly belonging to revenue department or other departments such as railways or even forests.
Experts point out the loss is unexplained in the report.
The report mentions ‘forest area’ as “area recorded as forests as per government records and labeled as Recorded Forest Area”. It also refers to ‘forest cover’ as “all lands with at least one hectare area or more and having canopy of more than or equal to 10 per cent”. This cover includes orchards, bamboo and palm and is irrespective of ownership and legal status.
“In the absence of correlation between ‘forest cover’ and ‘forest area’, it can only be presumed that 1,488 sq kms of forests are lost and have not been accounted for in the report,” Prakriti Srivastava, former principal chief conservator of the Kerala forest department, told Down To Earth (DTE).
She added that the biennial report published by Forest Survey of India (FSI) under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has many discrepancies which have not been explained.
For instance, unclassed forests for Odisha increased from 17 sq km (in 1999) to a staggering 16,282 sq km between 2001 and 2015. But in just the next reporting cycle (in 2017), this figure drastically reduced to 22 sq km, and has been shown as 22 sq km in the 2023 report as well, for which no explanation has been offered, pointed out Srivastava.
In Uttar Pradesh, unclassed forest area dropped from 13,739 sq km (between 1995 and 1999) to a mere 3,323 sq km in 2001, the expert said.
Similar discrepancies are observed for Himachal Pradesh, Goa, West Bengal and Jharkhand, where unclassed forests have remained constant before suddenly increasing or decreasing over the years.
Krithika Sampath, a conservation researcher, said forest lands diverted for dams, roads, railways and other such permanent constructions are lost forever, but are not deleted from the records as ‘forests’, thus inflating figures.
“Again, here the lines between ‘forest cover’ and ‘forest area’ get blurred for which no explanation or clarification is given by the report,” Sampath told DTE.
The experts also said the projection of increase in forest area as 156.41 sq km and 1,445.81 sq km increase in total forest and tree cover is not a correct assessment due to factors described above.
“If all the steps had been taken for a scientific evaluation, it would have revealed a sharp decline in the forest area, forest cover as well as tree cover,” Sampath said.
Prerna Singh Bindra, former member of the National Board of Wildlife, said the report mentions mango comprising of 13.25 per cent of trees outside forests and coconut being 4.37 per cent.
“These are being counted as forest cover, which is such a wrong estimation and can only be rejected. These orchards, plantations of rubber, areca, etc, should have been deleted after ground-truthing and probably have been retained to inflate forest cover data,” she said.
Bindra said agroforestry crops are included in trees outside forests, which adds to inflating tree cover. These trees also include mango, coconut, rubber, areca nut, shade trees in tea and coffee plantations, acacia and eucalyptus, many of which are exotic species.
In case of bamboo tree cover in the report, the experts point out that it is not indicated as to which bamboo stands are being included in accounting forest cover. Bamboo clumps in homesteads up to 1 ha having 10 per cent cover are included in the calculation of forest cover.
“Being counted as forest cover is a huge inflation of forest cover and such areas, besides not being forests and being fragmented, do not offer an ecological value for biodiversity and wildlife conservation except to inflate forest cover figures,” Srivastava said.
She pointed out that according to the provisions of Indian Forest Act 1927, bamboo is not considered a tree to allow its harvesting without requiring felling permission from the forest department.
“Yet, in the 2023 report, bamboo has been included in tree cover with the justification that “now sufficient data is available with FSI” rather than any scientific basis,” she added.
The experts stressed that the government should try, and answer points raised by State Expert Committee (SEC) reports and the Lafarge order as directed in the TN Godavarman judgement.