The final part of CarbonCopy’s 5-part Forest series. From water to wildlife, the costs of relying on flawed data are heavy, say experts
India’s largest national security question is going unasked.
Going by the reports put out by Dehradun-based Forest Survey of India (FSI), the country’s adding forests. The country’s forest cover, says FSI, have grown from 642,401 square kilometres in 1987 to 715,342.61 square kilometres in 2023 — which means forest cover occupies 21.76% of the country’s geographical area.
Other datasets, however, don’t agree with the FSI. According to sister state-owned agency, Hyderabad-based National Remote Sensing Centre, India’s forest cover is not only 75,000 square kilometres (sq km) lower than what FSI claims, the country is also losing, not adding, forest cover. US-based Global Forest Watch too pegs India’s forest cover well below FSI’s numbers — at 440,000 sq km in 2020, roughly 15% of India.
Yet earlier, back in 2010, a pathbreaking paper titled Cryptic Destruction of India’s forests by Jean-Philippe Puyravaud, Priya Davidar and William Lawrence, had reached an even bleaker estimate. Comparing relative growth rates of forest cover and plantations, they concluded India’s natural forests had declined from 514,137 sq km in 1995 to 389,970 sq km in 2005.
As discussed in the fourth part of this series, the FSI’s methodological choices have created an outcome where the latter set of numbers hew closer to reality. “George Schaller’s The Deer and The Tiger has a table from The Handbook for Indian Forest Statistics for 1957-58, published by Dehradun’s Forest Research Institute in 1961,” a biologist who works on forest restoration told CarbonCopy. “That table pegs India’s forest cover at 24% in 1957-58. Going by the FSI, even after 65 years, India’s forest cover today is much the same. How is that possible?”
That said, even these numbers from NRSC et al are an overestimate. Forests cannot be measured in tens of metres or hectares. Size matters. As our previous report noted, look for forest patches large enough to be functional (larger than, say, 1,000 square kilometres) and India’s forest cover drops to 1-10% of the country.
Three questions lie here – two bleak and one laced with hope.
Why is the FSI exaggerating India’s forest numbers? If India has less than a tenth of its land under intact forest ecosystems, what does that portend for the country’s people and biodiversity? Across the world, as other countries too lose natural forests and gain plantations, Brazil has proposed the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), which offers to give nations $4 for every hectare of tropical forests they protect. So can schemes like TFFF help stem losses?
Missing the wood for the trees
India’s forest numbers have attracted gloss for a while now. Even back in 1980 when, after being asked by Indira Gandhi to determine India’s forest cover, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) determined 10.7% of India was closed forest and another 2.1% was open, degraded forests, the country’s forest establishment had objected. “In the 1970s, deforestation had been at its peak,” Parth Sarathi Roy, a former director of NRSC who had worked on that exercise, told CarbonCopy. “At that time, we came back with the finding that, between 1972-73 and 1981-82, India had lost 2% of its forest cover. The FD was very unhappy with these numbers and they insisted these be reconciled with their maps. Even by doing that, the updated number rose to 15-16%. The quantum of closed forests, however, stayed around 11%.”
The reasons it protested are unclear, but potentially include the forest department’s unwillingness to relinquish deforested land to the revenue administration; not to mention a desire to cover up failures in forest protection. In more recent years, India’s large allocation for afforestation has emerged as another factor. “Funds (CAMPA, NAP, Social Forestry, EAPs, etc.) come only when afforestation programmes are shown as a success,” said an IFS officer from Andhra Pradesh on the condition of anonymity. “When afforestation programmes are claimed to be successful, there has to be a corresponding increase in forest cover on the ground.”
In more recent decades, the desire to depict India as a fighter against climate change has one more reason to not let the country’s forest cover estimates drop. This is mainly about carbon stock. In 2021, going by FSI’s estimates, at 713,789 sq km, the carbon stock in India’s forests stands at 7.2 billion tonnes. The country has also committed to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030. “That is possible only when 33% of the country’s geographic area is under forests,” said Uma Shankar Singh, a retired IFS officer from the Uttar Pradesh cadre.
A key instrument here is programmes like Green India Mission, which, as the 2021 INDC says, seeks to boost India’s carbon sequestration by about 100 million tonnes annually by increasing the country’s forest/tree cover by “5 million hectares and (improving) quality of forest/tree cover on another 5 mha of forest/non-forest lands.”
Between these factors, a double movement has taken shape. While India has continued to lose forests to human pressure, timber traffickers and industrial/infrastructure projects, it has embraced as definition of forests so expansive that it counts plantations and tea gardens as forests and begun including smaller and smaller forest fragments in its forest cover estimates.
Riding on such choices, India claims its forests are growing. “India is one of the few countries where forest and tree cover has increased in recent years, transforming the country’s forests into a net sink owing to national policies aimed at conservation and sustainable management of forests,” says the country’s INDC document for 2022. India’s long-term goal, the document adds, is to bring 33% of its geographical area under forest cover.
Along the way, however, an uglier outcome is taking shape for India. The country is losing natural forests and gaining plantations. The latest ratio between the two is unknown, but, as our previous report noted, functional forest ecosystems now cover less than 10% of India’s geographical area.“The condition of forests should not be assessed by carbon growth or tree numbers, but by the condition of reserve and protected forests, which are the source of more than 450 rivers and rivulets of our country and source of recharging the aquifers, binding the soil and controlling the hydrology so vital for sustaining the food, nutritional, climate, livelihoods and water security of millions of people of the country,” wrote VK Bahuguna, a former director-general of ICFRE.
At 9 million ha of very dense forests and 24. 35 million ha of moderately dense forests, he wrote, only 33 million ha of India’s forest cover has good density in the recorded forest area. “The real good forest is only around 10 to 11 per cent of the geographic area,” he estimated as well.
So what does forest cover around 10% – or lower yet – portend for the country?
The fallouts that follow
Going by the Development of Spatial database on intact forest landscapes of India, most of India’s intact forest landscapes are now found in relatively remote places — in the eastern Himalayas, followed by the Western Himalayas, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and then, the Western Ghats. Within these, says the paper, “The highest area of IFL was found in elevation zone of 2,500-3,000m followed by 2,000-2,500m and 1,500-2,000m,” it says, and adds: “No intact forest landscapes of larger than 10 (square kilometres) were found in arid, semi-arid, Deccan, north-east and Gangetic plains.”
The physical reality created by this bleeding of natural forests is already being experienced in India. As they shrink and/or lose key species, their capacity to perform ecological functions is dropping.
The outcome is a smorgasbord of effects. India’s water cycle is fraying, for one. In April 2024, to take one instance, the upper reaches of the Cauvery, a principal source of water for both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, dried up. That is just the start. Non-timber forest produce is a major part of India’s forest-dwelling communities’ livelihood. As reporters have been finding, non timber forest produce (NTFP) collections are falling. Between July and August 2021, people in six forest villages in eastern Maharashtra told reporter Mridula Chari about changes in how and when vital trees flower and fruit. “This uncertainty in the annual patterns of these forest crops impacts locals’ ability to plan for their crucial summer income, when other work is unviable,” she wrote. In the western ghats, in response to water shortages, biologists are seeing a spike in exotic species. Or take Suhelwa in Uttar Pradesh. Despite being wooded, it is no longer a home for deer or big cats.
“India’s forests are reaching ecological tipping points,” said Roy. With that, as forests like Suhelwa suggest, the woods might be around but their characteristics will change. “With that, as Roy said, their ability to support human and non-human life goes down.
As forests withdraw, India is also seeing spillover. Not just in the form of increased human-wildlife conflict, but also new disease outbreaks like Kyasanur in the Western Ghats and an eight-fold increase in the incidence of malaria in districts like Assam’s Sonitpur at the time both Sonitpur and the Western Ghats were seeing forest losses.
These effects, incidentally, will get worse. The third part of this series had discussed the forest department’s outdated working plans. “Working plans are made for a certain number of years after which they have to be rewritten,” wildlife biologist BC Chowdhury had told CarbonCopy. “But now, if you look at the last 3 working plans, I would not be surprised if you will find the same sentences and numbers. If a working plan for 1990 said 11,152 khair, the reports for 2000 and 2010 will repeat that. In effect, we are losing trees without knowing what really exists.”
That malaise extends beyond individual forest patches to the entire forest bureaucracy. India no longer knows the real expanse of its natural forests, but NTFP collections and forestland diversions continue as though forests are plentiful. “We set targets on NTFP collection without knowing how large these forests are,” said Roy. “We divert forests thinking we have a lot of forests. Along the way, we miss forest fragmentation, decadal changes in forests, state wise forest distribution, or how biodiversity is doing.”
Consider, once more, the Cauvery. The river originates in forested Kodagu, in the Western Ghats, before flowing through Karnataka and then Tamil Nadu. Both states, as is well-known, face water shortages and, consequently, squabble endlessly over water-sharing from the river. Undiscussed by either state government, however, are forest diversion plans for Kodagu. “They are building two rail lines, a high tension wire, NHAI’s highway through that forest,” said Singh from Uttar Pradesh. “5 lakh trees will be cut. Along the way, 70% of the Cauvery’s catchment will be lost.”
Kodagu is far from being an exception. Great Nicobar, despite being one of India’s last remaining intact forest landscapes, is about to lose 130 square kilometres of forest and anywhere between 1 million to 10 million trees. Adani’s Parsa Kente Basan coalblock in Hasdeo Arand will claim 3.68 lakh trees. In Arunachal, Dibang Multipurpose Project will kill 3.2 lakh trees and Etalin hydel project will cut another 2.7 lakh trees. The Ken-Betwa river linking project will cull as many as 46 lakh trees. Another 1.24 lakh trees will fall to the Mhow Khandwa railway line gauge conversion. India also lost over 50,000 trees to the Char Dham project — and came close to losing another 25 lakh trees to the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation project. Or take Dibru Saikhowa National Park. “There, the government extended the drilling plan and then the place caught fire,” said Singh.
On the whole, just the projects cleared by India’s environment ministry between 2020 and 2022 will cull 2.3 million trees.
This is the accompanying cost of the environment ministry and FSI exaggerating forest cover numbers. A country that believes forests cover 21.76% of its land mass will be more cavalier with them than one with 10% under forests. Take Great Nicobar. A country that recognises that its intact forest landscapes covered just 34,061 square kilometres by 2017 and are almost certainly smaller now would (hopefully) try harder to not lose another 130 square kilometres.
Endgame
Offering $4 for every hectare of tropical forests, can TFFF (Tropical Forests Forever Facility) staunch this damage?
One answer lies in India’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submission for 2022. It mentions that India’s formula for devolution of funds from the centre to the state “attaches 7.5% weight to the area under forest,” and adds: “By conditioning about USD 6.9 billion of transfers to the states based on their forest cover, which is projected to increase up to USD 12 billion by 2019-20. Implicitly, India is going to transfer to states roughly about USD 174 per hectare of forest per year, which compares very favorably with other afforested countries.”
As answers go, this one is misleading. Not only do other parameters like poverty and population, both of which add to human pressure on forests, carry more weight in the formula than forest cover, India also has larger incentives for afforestation and deforestation than forest protection.
This needs to be understood. Even if India gets $4/ha from TFFF for the entire 715,342.61 square kilometres it claims as forest cover, that adds up to an annual payment of Rs 2,432 crore. To put that in perspective, allocations from just one afforestation scheme — CAMPA — to states between 2019-20 and 2023-24 stood at Rs 38,516 crore. Compounding matters, as government studies themselves found in the case of Khair, the country’s forest establishment also earns from illegal logging.
For TFFF to work, its outlay has to be measured against country-specific incentives for deforestation and afforestation. In India, atleast, the economic incentives for deforestation and afforestation are far more attractive than the one for protecting natural forests. TFFF won’t work here.
In other words, India will go the Easter Island way. Once dense with forests, it lost its trees — whether to deforestation or rats is yet debated — till none were left. Shortly afterwards, human settlements on the island blipped out as well.
Over the past 20 years, lulled into complacency by FSI’s reports, India has followed a similar trajectory. It ignores a mass of counterfactuals — persistent timber trafficking; forest diversions for large projects; forest fragmentation; the rising incidence of forest fires; a rise in human:wildlife conflict; a drop in numbers of species like elephants; the drying up of perennial rivers; new disease outbreaks a la Ebola; dropping NTFP collections; cut logs being washed down Himalayan rivers — and thinks further trees and forest losses are acceptable.
What remains unknown is ecological collapse. How many natural forests in India are not working like before? And how many natural forests are following them towards collapse. “The collapse of a wild system may be gradual for a long period and then sudden,” writes Suprabha Seshan of Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary. “There will come a point beyond which things just give up and buckle under the strain.”
Which, incidentally, is what the vast Congo basin is seeing. “The Congo Basin’s trees generate up to 85 per cent of local rainfall — more than in the Amazon — keeping the forest humid and sustaining continuous precipitation,” wrote Financial Times earlier this week. “Seasonal winds then carry this moisture westward, supplying almost a fifth of the rainfall in West Africa.” Today, however, as trees in the basin get felled, rainfall in West Africa is dropping — and harvests of crops like Cocoa are falling, eating into export revenues of countries like Ivory Coast (which might lose 80% of its cocoa output), Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria.
“If current rates (of deforestation) continue, 27 per cent of the forest could be lost by 2050… leading to persistently drier conditions both locally and across West Africa,” wrote the business newspaper.
Such scenarios, establishing linkages between forest cover losses and their resultant impacts on the weather systems that keep India inhabitable are scarce in India.
Given that national security comprises the protection of a country, its people and its economy, it’s hard to see these questions as anything, but a national security imperative.
And yet, as with air and water pollution, so with forests. India is silent. It makes one think of the opening line from Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. “We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity.” We should remember that both society and economy are subsets of ecology.
Note: This is the final part of a CarbonCopy series on forest losses in India. Read them all here: Opening essay; How illegal loggers all but wiped out Acacia catechu in Uttar Pradesh; With the trade now moving to other states, the tree is now become harder and harder to find across the country; Why, despite illegal felling and project diversions, India’s forest cover numbers keep rising.
About The Author
