The National Mission for a Green India bases its estimates and proposals for action on the information provided by the Forest Survey of India (FSI), and its execution by the Forest Department (FD). Regrettably, FSI data is quite outdated, available on a crude scale and deliberately distorted. At the same time, the FD, an anti-science, anti-nature, anti-people agency, will never end up greening the Western Ghats. What we need instead is a different science-based, nature-centric and people-oriented approach.

I came to understand the way the FD manages its affairs as a result of M Y Ghorpade, then Karnataka’s finance minister, being gheraoed by basket weavers in 1975. The weavers were complaining about the excessive cutting of bamboo by the paper industry in the state, which was adversely affecting their livelihoods. Ghorpade decided that an objective evaluation was required and asked me to undertake the task. This took me to the West Coast Paper Mills (WCPM) at Dandeli, in the district of Uttara Kannada in Karnataka.

My mandate was to investigate whether bamboo resources had indeed been depleted and assess afresh the resource position, based on the data available from the FD’s “Pre-Investment Survey of Forest Resources” (PISFR), WCPM, and our own fresh fieldwork. These field studies revealed the PISFR figures to be overestimates by a factor of 10. This inflated figure for bamboo had provided a justification for setting up one more paper mill. We were able to........

© Indian Express