G.L Khajuria
With around 330 million hectares of the geographical area, India ranks seventh largest landmass globally. The systems and types of land use have been conditioned by multihued factors such as climatic conditions, temperature, air, precipitation so on and so forth. And of these, the climatic conditions are primarily expressed in terms of precipitation, rainfall received in various parts of the Country. Rainfall in India is unequally distributed in spaces. The mean annual rainfall ranges from less than 10 mm in parts of Rajasthan desert to more than 4000 mm in the western Ghats.
The intra-annual distribution of precipitations is also uncertain and seasonally skewed. The bulk of rainfalls is received during the South- West monsoons (mid June to September). However, during this season there are periodic spells or drought which are frequent in the arid and semi-arid areas /zones of the country covering the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat and partly some portions of MadhyaPardesh located in the central India. Consequently, the Crop yield of rainfed sorghum-Millet of the arid and semi-arid areas of India are subjected to periodic fluctuations.
The spatial difference in the availability of precipitation reflected in the relative differences in the amount of per unit area runoffs from the various rivers of India both in inter and intra annual terms. The central water commission (1988), places the average annual natural runoff available to India at 1880 million cubic meters . The water storage structures created or under construction are able to store only 13.5% of the mean annual runoff, in so far as ground water resources are concerned.
The estimates are that the replenishable ground water resources in India excluding North-east is 420 BCM per year of which 35.7 BCM per year is utilizable for irrigation against actual utilsation of only 106 BCM per year.
The unusual distribution of precipitation and water resources have conditioned agricultural cropping system and other systems of farming, though irrigation has successfully transformed the water starved areas of Punjab, Haryana and western parts of Uttar Pradesh into the food bowls of India. However, there are sufficient indications that the agricultural front has stopped expanding. This is quite evident from the fact of net areas having increased from 119 million hac in 1950-51 to 140 million hac and stabilized at that level.
In any case , an expanding agricultural front was not essentially and environmentally conducive , since extension of cultivation to marginal lands had produced in its wake of the problems of soil and water erosion. And when this fact is related to the agricultural area subject to double or multiple cropping; the area of agricultural land sown more than once increased from 25,524000 hac 1971 to 36,77000 hac in 1986-87, resultantly increase in food grains production by 42 million tons in the period 1970-71 to 1985-86.
As a consequence, it can very conveniently be concluded that agricultural production in India has had been on intensive margin i.e. modern technologies of production initiated during green revolution of late 1960’s . But spatial width of the intensive agricultural operation is narrow since the green revolution has been evident mainly in the northern western portions of India and portions of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Naidu in South India.
India is as well endowed with large areas of non-agriculture production. And these areas are having expanse and diversified forest cover ranging from temperate vegetation in the sub-Himalayan and Himalayan region of moist -ever green forests in the North-east , the western coast and the Andaman and Nicobar islands. The forest cover of our country as per survey of India’s latest report (2015), reveals that we continued to have 21% of forest despite population explosion, increased biotic pressure accruing from grazing, encroachments and diversification of forest areas for multidisciplinary purposes. As a result, therefore, there have been a marginal increase of 1% forest cover.
The overall situation is that the total green cover now stand for 697888 sq kms (21.23%) of the geographical area and upto 5871 sq kms (10.92%) from 92,027 sq kms as had earlier from existing during the year 2011 survey report. As such there has been a marginal increase of just 31 sq kms in very dense forests, whereas moderately dense forest went down to 1991 sq kms and open forests accounts for 7831 sq kms.
As per Anmol Kumar, the Director General , Survey of India, the carbon stocks of the county have increased by 4.07% whereas regeneration capacity is around 48% of the total forest area.
Broadly speaking, the forests of India have been divided into 16 major groups comprising into 221 types . Tropical deciduous forests form the major percentage of forests cover in India (37% of total forest cover ) followed by tropical dry deciduous forest (29.6%). The tropical wet evergreen forests comprise only 8% of total forest cover . Of the total area around 63.91 million hac& dense forests (crown dense Cover) account for only 38.50 m. hac. There is no tree cover over 11.27 M. Hac forests are under stocked. About 52.8% of forests don’t have adequate regeneration. The per capita forest area has astonishingly decreased drastically.
Apart from natural forests, manmade forests area also increased on account of afforestation programmers initiated by government of India as well various state governments under various schemes. The lands so afforested have substantially been increased. Despite this progress in afforestation, the target of 33% land area under forest cover as laid down in the National Forest Policy 1988, will be a remote goal at the moment. The reasons are the tendency towards deforestation and diversion of forest land towards non-forestry activities by the multi-disciplinary departments of all hues. And apart from meeting up fuelwood and fodder requirements, the increasing incidents of authorized as well as unauthorized felling.
In so far as forest conservation measures are concerned, these are not well in place, whereas the trend of deforestation is more severe compared to that which had been over the years.
With rising consciousness and the apprehensions involved allowing it to degenerate, there is an urgent need to build the methods for the protection and preservation of our natural resources. However, considering that the forests are the bedrock for the economic growth and development and also support the need of much of the population, these must be put to optional use. This involves integrating environmental concerns with all activities and making of correct choices and treads offs.
To ensure that the best choices are being made and the value of protecting the environment is not being ignored, adequate human resource development, especially through proper training programmers, needs to be promoted.
In so far as training aspect is concerned, the imparting of specific skills are warranted to be inculcated. And these involve such sort of persons who are either experience as a part of work to perform certain tasks which require skills or those who would like a citizens of voluntary groups or organizations perform such tasks and such persons can be classified as civil servants who are required to assist in the formulation of policies and plans , and to carry out development projects or activities so associated with such programming. Two; professionals both technical (engineers, scientists, lawyers, Judges or Social scientists and managers, both within and outside the governmental organizations. These persons are needed to be involved in designing, assessing and managing projects activities having potential impact on the environment. These all educators or trainers who educate and train other people need, therefore, be trained initially themselves. Fourth; environmental activists who are basically involved in fighting for the environment often against government or corporate interests should qualify the skills to effectively carry on this coveted job on broader spectrum.
As a corollary , therefore, different categories of people need training to effectively perform the tasks related to the conservation, protection and regeneration of environment and to use one or more of the available strategies for which training needs to be imparted.
Special emphasis should be laid to retraining environment implementation assessment (EIA).The need for sustainable development involves, among other things, the ability to assess the impact of development activities and the projects on the environment.
This enables the making of correct choices so that only those projects that are environmentally viable are given the green signal, and even their environmental impact is minimized. The EIA also gives a direction for the development of new processes and technologies which help in determining the real social costs of products and services and highlights the need for conserving resources and finding or developing substitutes scare ones.
The rapid rate of economic growth in India means that there are at any given time, a large number of development projects in planning and implementation of environmental boosting . There is, therefore, a dire need to build trained human power for environmental implementation assessment (EIA), especially among independent institution and within the government.
(The author is former Deputy Conservator of Forest, J&K).
