Complying with top court orders, Centre makes ‘deemed’ forest reports public

IN COMPLIANCE with a recent Supreme Court order, the Environment Ministry has released reports from 22 state governments and four Union Territories identifying the forest areas under their jurisdiction, but data in several of these reports appear to be incomplete or lacking details sought by the apex court.

The Supreme Court had, on February 19 this year, asked the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change to obtain and submit a “comprehensive” record of land identified as forests by expert committees set up for this purpose in each of the states as per an earlier direction of the court.

The order had come on a petition challenging the 2023 amendment to the Forest( Conservation) Act, 1980. FCA makes it mandatory for anyone to seek a government clearance for using any forest land for non-forest purposes. One of the main provisions of the 2023 amendment said that FCA would be applicable only on land that was notified as forest in government records. This went against a 1996 order of the Supreme Court in which it had clarified that FCA applied to not just notified forest land, but any land that was forest according to the dictionary meaning.

The expert committees, which were formed in pursuance of the 1996 order, were supposed to identify 'deemed' forests which were forests “as per dictionary meaning”, irrespective of their notification, recognition or ownership status. The reports of the expert committees were, however, never made public.

In its February 19 order, the Supreme Court said the states must continue to follow the dictionary meaning of forests for applying FCA for the time being, and asked the Environment Ministry to submit the reports of all the expert committees, which has now been done.

However, details of the reports showed that most states had only provided broad data on such deemed forests without details of their boundaries or exact locations. In fact, some states like West Bengal have not provided any details in their expert committee reports.