Withering Heights? The massive tree plantation movement in UP shows numbers, not environmental conservation, matter
No one from the UP forest department looks after old plantations. The seedlings are planted but there are no regular quality checks. How will this really help?
About 50 million seedlings were planted in one day during the tree plantation drive of 2016 in Uttar Pradesh. 90 million seedlings were planted in 2018. The status of the growth, success and survival rate of the seedlings is not known. The UP forest department has not revealed any data in relation to this on their website.
The UP forest department is going for another marathon effort to plant 220 million seedlings in one day on August 9, 2019, out of which 65.3 million seedlings are to be planted by the forest department and the rest — more than 150 million — by farmers and other organisations. The farmers of UP have adopted agroforestry practices in more than 30 districts and have the potential of planting more than 150 million seedlings.
A big question, however, that looms over the plantation drive is about the quality of seedlings — largely, preparation of the nurseries is initiated in the month of March 2019, which means technically, it is almost impossible to have quality seedlings of the farmers choosing.
The farmers have some other questions as well — which tree species will be planted, what would be the productivity of the seedlings provided to the farmers, will any permission be needed during harvesting, who will be the buyer if the market falls, as it happened earlier? The UP forest department will do well to answer these questions.
The forest department must also consider providing the details of the seedlings available in the nurseries with quality parameters such as tree species, height and collar width of the seedlings. The government should be more open about putting out the data of the survival rate of the old plantations and those should be made available on the government’s website. Plantation drives by themselves will have limited success if we do not plan for maintenance.
Generally, forest departments have budgetary provisions for maintenance but other departments such as irrigation, education, Public Work Development etc, neither have the technical expertise nor do they have budgets. Third-party verification of the plantations till the seedlings attain the minimum age of five years must be brought in place, along with a minimum maintenance plan of five years for all plantations. Quality control and regulatory mechanism of planting material employed by the government would also be helpful.
The government is putting increased efforts and investing funds for providing a green and clean environment for its citizens. Maintaining old plantations will go a long way in bolstering these efforts. Also, better plans should be made for plantation drives and mere records should not be the goal. Since such plantations affect the ecology, the planting of more than 220 million tree seedlings could have been spread over three months instead of doing it in one day for better survival and thus, the success of the effort.
The farmers in UP are demotivated as the market failure of many agroforestry species, particularly the price of poplar, crashed in the recent past that led to huge financial losses. A solution towards this could be to initiate the minimum support price (MSP) policy for agroforestry and to pass on the financial value of carbon sequestered by trees planted by farmers. The value of carbon could be part of the MSP formula. As of now, the farmers are not assured of the production of timber from trees grown on their fields as they are of the production in case of agriculture crops.
The way forward could be to have a third-party verification and maintenance of the plantations till they attain a minimum of five years of age, and creating institutional mechanism for implementing MSP policy, which would enable India to achieve the Nationally Determined Contribution target agreed during Paris Agreement under United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to mitigate the climate change, and also contribute towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).