Fractured/Earth

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?

And there you go. That is the fifth — and final — instalment in our series on how India’s forests are actually doing. India does little to curb wildlife trafficking, as we know. Our series used Acacia catechu, Khair, to gauge how the country’s forest department is faring on timber trafficking. We found it is equally compromised and ineffective on timber trafficking as well. See this and this on how Khair has been all but extinguished in MP and UP; and how traffickers are now shifting to J&K, Uttarakhand and Himachal. 

As things stand, the Khair story takes us into a larger question that has stayed undiscussed for too long. India’s forests have been under pressure for long. And yet, from the late 1990s onwards, the Forest Survey of India has posited a rising trend in India’s land area covered by forests. Much has been written about the expansive definitions and bureaucratic sleights of hand which allow FSI to count plantations as forests and make this common sense-defying claim. On which, see our opening report.

The Khair stories, ergo, raise a larger, long-pending question. As India’s environment ministry continues to divert natural forests for large projects and, as a national bonus, fails to curb trafficking of commercially viable forest trees (Khair = synecdoche), how much natural forest (forest cover minus plantations and public gardens) is India left with? In the fourth part of our series, we attempted an answer by talking to satellite imaging scientists at NRSC and elsewhere.

The real answer, once we remove forest fragments (too small to provide the ecological services we need from forests) and plantations (too mono-cropped to provide the ecological services we need from forests), is anywhere between 1-10% of India’s land mass by 2017! It is bound to be even lower now. To put these numbers in perspective, the FSI has been lying to us, telling us we have 21.76% of our land cover under forests. A number which makes all of us blase about further forest loss. That is story four.

Even as the FSI tells citizens a self-serving bureaucratic lie, we have to ask ourselves another question. There is a qualitative difference in ecology of a country with 21.76% forest cover and another with less than 10%. If India has less than 10% forest cover, what does that portend for the country? That is our final report, the one hyperlinked at the top of this post. Among other things, this report also contains a reality check on TFFF, Brazil’s plan to give forest-rich tropical countries $4 per hectare to preserve those forests. As the Khair stories — and the fifth report in our series — show, in India atleast, the incentives for deforestation and plantations run far higher.

Aka, this country is — barring a sudden swerve into good governance — doomed.