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The Supreme Court has ordered the Centre and state governments to refrain from taking any steps that will lead to ‘reduction of forests’.
The interim order was delivered by a bench of Justice B R Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran on February 3, 2025. The court was hearing a number of petitions challenging the amendments to the 2023 Forest Conservation Act 1980 now renamed as Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, 1980.
The amended Act circumvented the December 12, 1996 order of the Supreme Court in the landmark T N Godavarman v Union of India judgment and restricted the definition of forest land, thereby enabling exemptions for various activities and projects under the purview of the Act, the petitioners had alleged.
The court was hearing an affidavit filed last month in which the petitioners, comprising of activists and former forest, IAS and foreign service officials raised concerns that the provisions in the Act now allow access to large parcels of forest land for uncontrolled deforestation, illegal diversion and use, with minimal regulatory scrutiny.
The petitioners had filed the petitions in November 2023. In February 2024, the Supreme Court reinstated that no changes should be made to the 1996 T N Godavarman judgement.
It also directed states and Union territories to form new expert committees as per Rule 16 of the amended FCAA 2023. These would include all forest areas as identified by state expert committees (SEC) constituted under the Godavarman order of 1996 as well as any other forest area identified by the newly constituted expert committees.
This would ensure that all forests, unclassed forests, community forests and any other forests as defined in the Godavarman order — forests as per dictionary meaning, irrespective of ownership — are included.
However, the petitioners in their affidavit pointed out that the exercise was not even started, and therefore, not completed within a year as directed by the Supreme Court. The data collated by the SECs constituted as per the 1996 Godavarman order were ‘incomplete’ and ‘sketchy’, as per the SEC reports placed online by MoEF&CC on their portal.
Moreover, the affidavit, a copy of which Down To Earth has accessed, stated that since February 19 last year, eight Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) meetings have been held by the MoEF&CC between April and December 2024 in which 56 proposals were considered and diversion of 1,753.02 hectares of forest land were approved.
The minutes of the meetings noted that 37 of these proposals were cleared, while 16 were deferred and three were not considered. It also noted that in 14 of the cases, no land was offered for compensatory afforestation (CA), a violation of the Adhiniyam.
“Instead, degraded forest alone has been accepted for afforestation in lieu of CA compliance, clearly violating the Consolidated Guidelines and Clarifications issued under the 2023 Rules issued by the MOEF&CC on December 29, 2023,” the affidavit observed.
In addition, 23 cases which mentioned CA land as ‘non-forest land’ is most probably unclassed forests. This should have been identified and put on record by the SECs of respective states as directed by the 1996 Godavarman order and its diversion, subject to the clearance process of the FCA.
The petitioners said raising plantations on degraded notified forest lands is being accepted as CA compliance, without furnishing of equivalent non-forest land in lieu of the diverted forest land. This does not fulfil the requirement of compensation of “tree for tree and land for land” as stipulated by CA guidelines.
The affidavit further said the Indian State Forest Report 2023 has multiple gaps on forest records and forest loss due to diversions between 1996 and 2023 has not been accounted in the report.
“To illustrate, as per a statement made by the Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Shri Bhupinder Yadav from 2008 to 2023, India has cleared diversions of forest lands to the tune of 300,000 hectares or 3,000 sq km of forest. But this has not been accounted for in the ISFR 2023,” they said.
The Supreme Court while hearing the case on February 3 said, “We make it clear that until further orders, no steps will be taken by the Union of India or any of the States, which will lead to reduction of the forest land unless a compensatory land is provided either by the State Government or the Union of India for the purpose of afforestation.”
Kaushik Choudhury, lawyer for the petitioners, said if any forest land is diverted, the state or Union has to provide compensatory land for the purpose of afforestation.
“The forest land will not reduce. It will remain intact. If any land is used for any non-forest purpose, the government has to provide separate land in replacement of that,” he added.
Prakriti Srivastava, former Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Kerala and one of the petitioners said the Supreme Court’s directions are clear that no forest land irrespective of its status as ‘notified’, ‘recorded’, ‘unclassed’ or ‘degraded’ should be used for CA and non-forest land alone should be allotted instead.
Srivastava said, “The provisions under the amended FCAA2023 already allows only afforestation of notified degraded forests as CA compliance without providing equivalent non-forest by PSUs and other government undertakings or providing unclassed forests as land component of CA compliance by other user agencies. But the latest order has clarified that providing equivalent non-forest land in lieu of diverted forest land has become mandatory, which is a very positive outcome.”
She added that as per the amended FCAA2023, many user agencies need to only give money for afforestation of degraded forest lands for twice the area diverted, without furnishing equivalent non-forest land and only then can afforestation be done on notified/recorded forests as CA compliance.
“With this order of SC only money for afforestation has been stopped. Any forest land diversion will mandatorily require equivalent non-forest land to be given by the user agency to the forest department in exchange,” she added.