New Delhi: The National Green Tribunal – India’s apex green court – has taken suo motu cognisance of the loss of nearly 6 million trees across India’s farmland tracts, citing that this is a violation of two important environmental legislations in the country – the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980.
The NGT took up the issue based on a news report on the study, which noted that this loss occurred in just a span of around three years. There were also ‘hotspots’ of farmland tree loss: huge hotspots across the states of Maharashtra and Telangana and smaller ones such as in Indore in Madhya Pradesh.
The NGT on July 4 therefore issued notices to the union environment ministry, and the forest departments of the states of Maharashtra, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh, to respond on the matter. The next hearing of the case has been scheduled for July 31.
India lost 5.6 million farmland trees
India lost a whopping 5.6 million large trees in farmland tracts across the country, found a study published on May 15 in the journal Nature Sustainability. And this ‘vanishing’, as the scientists who studied this call it, occurred in a very short time span: from 2018 to 2022.
Scientists found this when they mapped individual large trees (that have a canopy diameter or tree crown centre of more than 10 square meters) across farmlands all over India, using high resolution satellite imagery.
They also found that there were several hotspots of tree loss: some regions lost more than 50 trees per square kilometre. Hotspots where trees have “vanished” include parts of northwestern India, and central India including Maharashtra and Telangana. As per the study, these areas in central India have lost up to 50 per cent of their large farmland trees. The team also observed “smaller hotspot areas of loss”, such as in eastern Madhya Pradesh, around Indore, as The Wire reported in its coverage of the study.
Violation of laws: NGT
Taking suo motu cognisance of a news report about the study in The Hindu on May 18, the principal bench of the National Green Tribunal at New Delhi comprising justices Prakash Shrivastava and Arun Kumar Tyagi noted that the news report indicated the “violation of the provisions of the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980.”
The NGT order dated July 4 also added that the news report of the study “raises substantial issue relating to compliance of the environmental norms and implementation of the provisions of scheduled enactment”.
For instance, India’s Forest Conservation Act, 1980, while also providing for the protection and conservation of forest tracts, also lays down very specific rules for the felling of trees in private lands. Incidentally, the union government amended the Act last year.
Now called the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, 1980, the hugely controversial amendment also proposes to remove private land holdings from the ambit of the Act to “encourage plantations” so that this will improve green cover and carbon sequestration.
Experts have pointed out that this would not bode well for India’s biodiversity or carbon capture because the amendment, instead of protecting existing old trees that already play an important role in carbon sequestration, could place more focus on developing plantations and monocultures, which are less valuable in terms of the ecological services they provide, as The Wire has reported.
The NGT will now hear the case about the disappearance of the 5.6 millions large farmland trees on July 31.
