Until now the rule was that if an industrial company cleared part of a forest for business use, it paid compensation to the forest department. More than that, the company itself had to choose and acquire another plot of land where the forest department would create new forest. That arrangement is now changing. The Forest Advisory Committee under the central Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has recently given the green light to a "green credit" scheme.

Under the scheme, what was purely the government's job can be done by a private company. It will choose the land and plant the trees, and if the work looks right and meets the forest department's conditions, after three years the land will be given the status of "compensatory forest". The private company may trade in whatever earnings come from the forest land if it wishes, and another industrial company may buy the plot from it for business use. In other words, forest land is being seen as a commodity. Handing it over from the government to private hands brings both trade and new forest: the environment is saved and the industry's development work carries on too.

There are problems. The forest cut down for business and the land created as compensatory forest are not of the same character. A forest is many-layered, home to hundreds and thousands of trees, creepers and plants. What a private company does on acquired land is plantation, mainly planting the same kind of tree. Perhaps rows of eucalyptus will be planted across the whole plot. Can that ever, even when mature, equal a forest? Because the private company has a fixed period to raise the trees, there will be a tendency to plant one or two species that grow easily or with little effort, instead of many.

The State of Forest Report published last year showed that green cover in the country has grown. But much of this green is commercial plantation; the extent of true "deep forest" is steadily shrinking. If the work is handed to private companies through green credits, there will certainly be tree planting, but how much forest will be created is hard to say. A forest does not only give oxygen; it shelters many forms of life and holds biodiversity together. A single-species plantation cannot nourish hundreds of lives.

Nor can one be confident about the commercial side. Will the private or industrial companies that join this work carry overall accountability? Will the rights of forest-dwelling communities be protected? If the forest department falls behind in its own work while trying to watch over all of this, there will be trouble too. There is no shortage of controversy over the central government's privatisation in various sectors, and on top of that there are allegations of favouring chosen private companies, which are by no means groundless. Whether the green drive will succeed while managing all this remains a question mark.

Source: Anandabazar. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.