Last month, on October 24, according to an official statement issued by Kunwar Vijay Shah, forest minister, Madhya Pradesh, approximately 37,420 sq km of degraded forest land (bigra van kshetra), which is about 40 per cent of the total forest area in the state, is to be handed over to private companies under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model. These are areas where there are fewer trees and more scrub.
“Towards the restoration and improvement of the degraded forest area of the state, the forest department has taken the initiative to entrust it to private investment,” said Shah. “The proposal will be sent to the Government of India for sanction and approval. The process of inviting private investment will commence after the approval, ” he added.
According to him, the contract with the private companies will be for 30 years. “Under the contract, 50 per cent of the revenue earned from the forest by the private investor will be given to gram van samitis/ gram sabhas,” he stated.
Madhya Pradesh enjoys 94,689 sq km of forest cover, and has the highest forest cover in the country, which is about 30 per cent of its geographical area, according to the 2019 report of Forest Survey of India, Dehradun. The report also states that of this, tribal communities live in 51,919 sq km, (about 55 per cent) of its forest areas, spread over 24 districts.
There are 9,650 gram van samitis in Madhya Pradesh that traditionally shouldered the responsibility of looking after the 37,268 sq km of forest land that is now going to be handed over to the private sector.
Of the 52,739 villages in Madhya Pradesh, 22,600 villages are situated in and around forests. Many of them occupy the bigra van that the government plans to hand over to private operators. These areas are a major hub of tribal inhabitation and livelihood. The environmentalists and those working with the tribal inhabitants fear that under the cover of development the government may evict the people from their traditional habitation.
“If this scheme is implemented, it will uproot tribal people from a large part of the forests,” Subhash Pandey, a Bhopal-based environmentalist, told Gaon Connection.
“The areas chosen by the government are densely inhabited by tribal people, for whom forests are the sole medium of sustenance. They sell firewood and leaves gathered from the forest,” said Pandey, who demanded to know where they would go when private companies took over.
According to the Madhya Pradesh forest minister’s official statement, the private sector, while reviving the degraded forests, will also create employment opportunities for the local inhabitants and will promote wood-based industries.
“Changes happen. We cannot always work on the same pattern. The PPP [public private partnership] model fetches a better result, so the government is moving towards that,” Chittaranjan Tyagi, the additional chief conservator of forests (development) of Madhya Pradesh, responded to Gaon Connection. “Right now, we are only considering it. The statement that has been issued was only to gather information about the areas,” he clarified.
Citing the examples of the government handing over railway, airport and road construction projects to the private sector, he said, “It is evident that the private sector companies provide good service at a lower cost and this is why the government is giving them this responsibility.”
Jabalpur-based conservationist Rajkumar Sinha is not buying the argument. “The forest land the government is going to hand over to private companies belongs to the village society and is community forest land,” an angry Sinha, who is working for the conservation of forest cover in the state, told Gaon Connection. The government took the decision entirely on its own, without bothering to ask the community or informing anyone about its move, added Sinha, who is also associated with the union formed by people displaced and affected by Bargi Dam. He described the government move as unjust and an infringement of the Forest Rights Act 2006.
“If these 37 lakh hectares [37,000 sq km] of land are given to private companies, where will the people inhabiting it go?” Sinha asked. Drawing attention to the law under the Fifth Schedule (tribal) areas that entitles the gram sabha control over its natural resources, he demanded to know why the gram sabhas, the van samitis and the local people were not intimated before the decision to hand over forests to private companies was taken. He said that if improvement of the area was the aim, then, the people living in these areas should have been taken into confidence. “Such an arbitrary and unilateral move overrides the powers of the gram sabha,” he pointed out.
“The government wants to gradually hand over the bigra van kshetra to big companies under the pretext of improving them, but the question is, if these are the impaired forests, what had the governments been doing in the last 70 years,” Satyam Srivastava, also from Jabalpur, and member of the committees relating to habitat rights and community rights constituted by the the tribal ministry of Government of India, told Gaon Connection.
“That area which the government has decided to hand over to private bodies falls under the ‘low-grade’ forest category, which includes dense, less dense and bushy areas,” Srivastava explained. But he is against classification of forests as being ‘degraded’ or ‘good’, as each kind of a forest has its own identity. “Besides, the government has not specified its policy for the people who would be displaced by its handing over their inhabited areas to the private companies. In this entire scheme, the government has not referred to the Forest Act anywhere. Not even a single line is written to assure the protection of people’s rights living there under the pre-existent Forest Rights Act,” Satyam Srivastava pointed out.
As far back as October 2001, the government of Madhya Pradesh had passed a bill that stated tribal inhabitants and other villagers living in and around forests would have the first right on the forest produce. Accordingly, forests in the state were being managed through the cooperation of local people under the system of joint forest management.
An old proposal
While the forest minister issued the statement about the public-private partnership only now, in 2015, Prakash Javadekar, the minister of environment, forest and climate change had talked about handing over degraded forest areas to private companies. “We have come up with a scheme in which we will lease our wastelands to private industries upon revenue sharing or some other model, whereby they will be allowed to grow forests for their industrial activity, ” he had said in a statement.
The reference to PPP comes up again in the Draft National Forest Policy 2018, which states: “The lands available with the forest corporations which are degraded & underutilized will be managed to produce quality timber with scientific interventions. Public private participation models will be developed for undertaking afforestation and reforestation activities in degraded forest areas and forest areas available with Forest Development Corporations and outside forests.”
In August 2020, according to a news report, in a draft presentation, NITI Ayog advised state governments to take stock of their degraded forest areas. Since the existing wildlife and forestry programmes have not had the desired effect, it recommended that they go into a partnership with private companies to improve matters.
Gaon Connection tried to contact the Union Ministry of environment, forest and climate change without success. All emails and phone calls to Kishore Kumar Singh, the additional chief secretary of the forest department in Madhya Pradesh, received no response.
