The Green India
Mission (GIM): carbon sequestration with benefits
(A pdf file of the entire article is available at https://www.academia.edu/21490696/Forest_Landscape_Restoration_in_India_Antecedents_experience_and_prognoses)
This brings us to the final (and most recent) application of the landscape approach in forest restoration in India, the Green India Mission (Government of India, 2010, 2011). This started out as a straightforward forest carbon sequestration programme statement as one of the eight missions of the prime minister’s National Action Plan on Climate Change. However, it was apparent from previous experiences, such as the social forestry projects and the JFM based projects, that any intervention in the forest sector was bound to have a whole trail of collateral considerations, external effects, and social and environmental concerns, so that it would be foolhardy to design a project or programme solely for increasing carbon in the standing forest crops. Therefore, while at the core there remained the target of raising 5 million hectares (mha) of new forest and improving the condition (standing volume) of another 5 mha of existing growth, there had to be a process-oriented, bottom-up, participatory, approach to identifying the locations and character of these crops and interventions. As can be seen from the mission document and brochure, the actual interventions would be integrated with restoration and improvement of a variety of ‘ecosystems’ or ecological types, such as forest of various densities, wetlands, scrubland, grassland, mangroves, cold desert, abandoned mines, and agro-forestry, and social forestry-type interventions on 3 mha non-forest land , not forgetting institutional lands, urban and peri-urban lands, and so on. Thus the programme would have multiple benefits apart from sequestering carbon, such as improving habitats and conserving biodiversity[1], restoring degraded lands and reducing soil and water loss, improving urban and rural environments, and supporting livelihoods through such interventions (this could be from agro-forestry, or from non-timber products in the forest or outside it, and integration with other rural sectors such as livestock/fodder, etc.). There are also to be a number of “cross-cutting” interventions like livelihoods enhancement, improving fuel efficiency of wood-burning stoves and promoting alternative energy, etc.
This brings us to the final (and most recent) application of the landscape approach in forest restoration in India, the Green India Mission (Government of India, 2010, 2011). This started out as a straightforward forest carbon sequestration programme statement as one of the eight missions of the prime minister’s National Action Plan on Climate Change. However, it was apparent from previous experiences, such as the social forestry projects and the JFM based projects, that any intervention in the forest sector was bound to have a whole trail of collateral considerations, external effects, and social and environmental concerns, so that it would be foolhardy to design a project or programme solely for increasing carbon in the standing forest crops. Therefore, while at the core there remained the target of raising 5 million hectares (mha) of new forest and improving the condition (standing volume) of another 5 mha of existing growth, there had to be a process-oriented, bottom-up, participatory, approach to identifying the locations and character of these crops and interventions. As can be seen from the mission document and brochure, the actual interventions would be integrated with restoration and improvement of a variety of ‘ecosystems’ or ecological types, such as forest of various densities, wetlands, scrubland, grassland, mangroves, cold desert, abandoned mines, and agro-forestry, and social forestry-type interventions on 3 mha non-forest land , not forgetting institutional lands, urban and peri-urban lands, and so on. Thus the programme would have multiple benefits apart from sequestering carbon, such as improving habitats and conserving biodiversity[1], restoring degraded lands and reducing soil and water loss, improving urban and rural environments, and supporting livelihoods through such interventions (this could be from agro-forestry, or from non-timber products in the forest or outside it, and integration with other rural sectors such as livestock/fodder, etc.). There are also to be a number of “cross-cutting” interventions like livelihoods enhancement, improving fuel efficiency of wood-burning stoves and promoting alternative energy, etc.
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| Hacked forest. Purdal, Shimoga, Karnataka, May 1990 |
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| Result of protection, Purdal, Shimoga, Karnataka, May 1990 |
Of specific interest here is the explicitly stated intention to adopt the “landscape approach”, which is interpreted as small to medium catchments around the village/ settlement of say 5000-6000 ha. The mission is to be multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder, with the community being in charge of identifying problems, devising responses, and monitoring the implementation, which is expected to be done through the gram sabha (GS) and the “revamped” JFM committees and Forest Development Agencies (FDAs) in the districts under the aegis of the panchayat raj institutions (PRI). The challenge lies in the fact that the government has not provided separately in the Plan document or annual budgets for the Rs.45,000 crores[2] (say USD 7 billion) that is the estimated cost over the next 10 years; the mission is to be funded by convergence from other on-going programmes, schemes, and missions, such as the flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) which has a budget of around Rs.50,000 crores a year (Government of India, 3 March 2015).
Criticisms and problems of the landscape approach in GIM
Not surprisingly,
social environmentalists and commentators have been quick to jump on the GIM on
account of the possible equity repercussions (as in the case of the SF
projects, JFM in general, WGFP in particular, etc.). The Forest Rights Act website (www.forestrightsact.com) describes
the “Dangers of the Green India Mission: A formula for
more land and resource grabbing”, and states that it is all a ploy to grab the
communities’ resources and convert them into carbon credits. Sourish Jha, Assistant professor at the
Department of Political Science, P.D.Women’s College, Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, charges
that “the so called community institutions implicitly
or explicitly involve an inclusive technique of exploitation of forest
communities under the rubric of ‘public-people participation’.” His paper seeks
to “expose further the neo-liberal schemata for incentivization of the
community service through GIM for raising carbon stock to promote an integrated
carbon market which ultimately will lead to defacement of the organic
relationship between the community and the forest” (Jha, no date, probably 2011?). The web-based
journal Equations (December 2011)
calls the GIM “India’s REDD+ Action Plan to disempower
and evict forest communities from their own homelands”. A parallel paper on the equitabletourism.org
website (ascribed again to Equations)
charges that “GIM targets these areas for large scale afforestation programmes
with fast growing native species and closure to grazing on rotational basis
thereby preparing the ground for displacing the forest communities from these
last forest areas, so depriving them of their habitat and livelihood options”. In
a more balanced critique, Sumana Dutta (2016) feels that the GIM document is
handing down a pre-conceived menu of options, which may not all be appropriate
in the specific situations of a locality, such as the Bankura forest of West
Bengal that the author was familiar with. On a different note, Dutta very
perceptively also comments that the experience of the ground staff needs to be
brought in, which has been affirmed in this author’s response in the Letters column of the
following issue of EPW (Dilip Kumar,
2016).
 |
| Degraded Minor Forest, Honnavar, Karnataka, May 1990. Note plantation on hill-top |
Some comments may be not out of place here from the viewpoint of the forest
administration. Firstly, it is very doubtful whether any carbon sequestered
through increased growing stock on the ground, will ever be parlayed into
dollars under the REDD+ scheme, since India is very unlikely to be a major
candidate for international carbon funding, as explained previously by the
author (Dilip Kumar, 2014b). Therefore, it may be an exaggeration to say that
carbon markets are going to threaten local uses and communities. Secondly, the
carbon captured has been seen consciously as a side benefit in the GIM document,
although it is true that the first impetus came from the climate change
mitigation interest. Although the initial drafts may have been cast mainly in terms
of biomass accrual and carbon capture (much as the early draft of the WGFP was
cast mainly in terms of improved status of the forests), those who were present
at the discussions leading to the changed concept of multiple co-benefits will
bear witness to the sometimes heated arguments that accompanied the drafting
process. The point made by the foresters (among them this author) was very much
on the lines that the social commentators are making, that it is difficult to
make interventions in India’s forests without bringing in train social effects,
and hence it is difficult, and inadvisable, to try to make projects aiming at
increasing biomass on the ground, a purely technical problem.
Thirdly, almost any land-based intervention
in India is going to have repercussions that may not always be equitable. The
green revolution in agriculture, for instance, obviously has better benefits
for the larger and better-off land owners, and mechanization and crop and
composition technical change often has repercussions on the employment of low-skill
wage labour (see previous references to Myrdal, 1968, pp.1344-45, 1367). But
this does not mean that no change or progress should be attempted. Similarly in
forestry, some interventions like closure of a particular patch of forest may
impose costs on the landless or the women, especially in the initial years, but
these could be compensated by earmarking other areas or developing sustainable
harvesting practices, varying the density of planting, and so on. In the single-interest schemes of
the past, the forest department used to take up plantations on a restricted
area without consideration for such spill-over effects, but under JFM and now
the landscape approach, it is expected that the whole situation will be
addressed, including provision for the landless, the women, NTFP collectors, bamboo workers, etc. Perhaps
the most important difference in
the landscape approach would be the way the situation analysis and problem
identification will be developed before finalizing the annual operational plans.
The specific models in the GIM document
should therefore be taken as just suggestions, and the actual interventions are
to be worked out on the ground through discussions.
During the formulation
of the GIM and the public consultation sessions, feedback from many forest
officers (privately to the author; the foresters were seldom given a hearing in
public) was that the coordination of many different departments would be a
problem, and that the only feasible way
to guarantee some useful outcome would be to give the implementing department a
clear-cut objective and physical target, give it clear-cut and full
responsibility for its own efforts, and provide the funds in a timely and
dependable manner. For example, the forest department will be happy to take the
responsibility for, say, raising nurseries and fuelwood and fodder plantations;
but they would not be able to guarantee the timing and appropriateness of
actions of other agencies, private or government, like the extension of
compressed cooking gas fuels, minimum support price purchases of collected
non-timber forest products, or provision of animal health services, and so on. This,
of course, would relegate to lower priority the bottom-up, open-ended,
consultative, community-led process envisaged in the landscape approach.
The GIM seeks to meet
such problems by suggesting a somewhat convoluted management structure, by
assuming that the central control will be with the district planning forum (a panchayati
raj institution of elected representatives), while the funds may flow directly
from the centre or through the district Forest Development Agency (FDA) which is
looking after the National Afforestation Programme (NAP), and thence to the implementing
entities which may be any of the bodies at the village or community level,
under both the PRI umbrella (including, among others, the Forest rights
Committees, Biodiversity Managememnt Committees, etc.), and the community-based
organizations (CBOs) sponsored by the line departments (like the village forest
committees, VFCs). Since synchronization of various components will depend on
the willingness of other agencies not under the project’s control, the end
result of an integrated project, however noble the intentions, may well be a
lop-sided development of those elements that were in the control of the
principal implementing department or agency.
A special problem with
the GIM as rolled out in recent years is that funds have not been ear-marked in
the national plan (see the author’s critique of the XII Plan, Dilip Kumar, 2015).
On the other hand, most of the money is supposed to be brought in from other
programmes like MNREGA, Plan schemes like the NAP, Finance Commission
devolutions to the states, the Compensatory Afforestation funds (CAMPA), other
Climate Change Missions, and so on. This poses the question, what is the real additionality contributed by the GIM. If
the forest departments of the states themselves
may tend to see the GIM as an unnecessary addition to their work burden, with
little financial backing, the other departments and agencies that are supposed
to coordinate with the GIM management would tend to see it as a completely
useless intrusion. Even the PRIs, the district planning structure, and the
village bodies (Gram Sabha) may well see the GIM as an imposition, if it comes
asking for funds from their budgets in addition to their time and efforts. This
may well be the killer assumption
that will make its success unlikely. The same would probably be true of any
integrated, multi-sectoral approach: unless it comes carrying gifts (budget,
expertise, technical cooperation, capacity building, infrastructure
improvement, support for NGO and SHGs, foreign visits, and so on and on), the target groups are liable to wonder why
they should put their resources and time at its disposal.
Social objectives and the Forest Department
A question comes up,
how far is the forest department responsible for social change and setting
right inequities in the society. Sharachchandra Lele (Lele & Menon, 2014,
p.52) accepts that poverty alleviation by itself is not a fair criterion to
judge the success of JFM. In fact, if one makes a dispassionate economic
assessment, it is not clear that poverty can be removed (even for
forest-dependent tribals and others) by depending solely on forest produce, as
returns from forestry are relatively low per unit effort and resource. For example, after all the organizational
effort for collection of tendu (Diospyros)
leaves for the beedi (leaf-rolled smokes), the average collector is left with
less than a month’s worth of wages in a year in Central India, at considerable
cost to the trees’ growth as they have to be repeatedly cut to get a flush of
leaves (and it may be added that beedis, the poor man’s cheroots, are a major
cause of cancer). As for the forest department, it sees JFM mainly as a
mutually beneficial way of rehabilitating degraded forest, but also as a way of
generating and providing wage labour as a support to forest-fringe villages.
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| Bamboo plantation, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. Oct 2011. |
However, just because
forest restoration is the starting point of JFM (or GIM, or the forest landscape
restoration approach, for that matter),
this does not mean that the foresters are entirely neutral to poverty
alleviation or equity considerations. After all, as a wing of the state
executive, the forest departments also share in the national objectives of
improving the condition of the poor, especially the socially and economically deprived
(from whose ranks at least 25% of the forest personnel themselves are
recruited), in addition to the environmental conservation goals. As a matter of
strategy, also, if the department feels that rural poverty is part of the
reason why people depend on sale of unsustainably collected wood and other
forest products, then improving the rural incomes through other occupations can
well become a part of the landscape conservation strategy.
 |
| Tussor silk moth larva, Jabalpur, Oct 2011. |
Both the supply side
and the demand side are then a candidate for the strategy. On the supply side,
by creating more biomass (in fringe forest and non-forest lands) specially for
the collectors (headloaders) and the local consumers, whether it be fuelwood or
poles or bamboos for artisanal raw material, the programme will shift the users
to a sustainable extraction regime, thereby saving the forest proper from
unregulated hacking, cutting of saplings, setting of fire, etc. (the social
forestry strategy). On the demand side, by providing other energy sources (e.g.
liquid petroleum gas, solar water heaters and driers, biogas, etc.), the
communities are gradually induced to reduce their requirement of forest
biomass. By improving water harvesting and thereby supporting agriculture,
pressure due to headloading, grazing, etc. on forest may be reduced. Therefore
general improvement in the rural economy, e.g. by improving water availability,
granting land (even marginal forest or shifting cultivation plots) to the
landless (as in the Forest Rights Act, 2006), supporting new livelihoods
(forest-based like lac, tussor silk cultivation, or others, like tailoring,
computer operation), may well contribute to the ultimate goal of taking
pressure off the forests. So the forest departments too may well have a
long-term interest in poverty alleviation and equity considerations, and need
not be condemned outright as opportunistically using the community as unpaid
watchmen.
[1] The programme monitors
and implementers would have to be extra vigilant in dealing with non-forest
habitats like grasslands and wetlands, in order not to fall into the error of
planting up all hectares with dense tree crops.
(A pdf file of the entire article is available at https://www.academia.edu/21490696/Forest_Landscape_Restoration_in_India_Antecedents_experience_and_prognoses)
References
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India
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and in blog postings at http://forestmatters.blogspot.com/2015/02/08-forestry-and-planning-commission-ii.html
Dilip Kumar, P.J. 2016. Green India
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