The forest bureaucracy has taken on environment minister Jairam Ramesh and Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chahavan to defend its turf. Despite the two planning to attend the first ever sale of bamboo by a village in India this week in Mendha-Lekha of Gadchiroli under the Forest Rights Act, the state forest department has announced that it is illegal and people will be prosecuted if they do so.
At stake is the forest bureacracy’s control over the Rs 10,000 crore per annum trade. The paper and pulp industry is the biggest benefactor, getting the raw material at dirt cheap prices. Mendha-Lekha is meant to set an example that shows that the environment ministry accepts what the law has said since 2006 – bamboo is a forest produce that people have a right to harvest and sell.
The Maharashtra principal chief conservator of forests (PCCF) – the highest forest official of the state – has written a letter warning that despite the Forest Rights Act of 2006 declaring bamboo as a forest produce that people can harvest, the forest department will not allow people to cut it. The department will continue to regulate its trade.
His letter comes despite Ramesh’s official letter to all states that bamboo was a forest produce and people should be allowed to harvest it where they claim rights over it under the law.
The state forest department has other plans, as it has already decided to auction off the district’s entire bamboo harvest and had put out a tender for it in March 2011.
The state PCCF has said that forest officials will decide what can be harvested and the village would have to seek their permission just as it did before.
Mendha-Lekha has become a test case for the entire country. The forest department has long denied people the right to harvest what’s often referred to as ‘green gold’ by defining it as a tree, which permits departmental control under the antiquated Indian Forest Act of 1927. Science has always defined bamboo as a grass. But the contractor-based system of auctioning off bamboo has given the paper industry access to the bulk of India’s bamboo at low rates, while the villagers got little.
The Forest Rights Act changed this by clearly defining people’s rights over forest produce. But since 2006 the forest department has maintained its stranglehold on the resource while the environment ministry looked the other way.
