Times of India: Nagpur: Tuesday,
June 21, 2016.
The BJP
government in the state wants to make a record by planting over 2 crore
saplings on July 1, but the state forest department, which is the front-runner
in the campaign by taking up over 1.5 crore saplings, is hiding records of its
previous plantations.
On Monday,
the forest department gave evasive answers to questions asked by city-based RTI
activist Avinash Prabhune on circle-wise achievement of plantations under
Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management & Planning Authority (CAMPA) in
the last two years, 2014-16. Moreover, the office of additional principal chief
conservator of forests (APCCF) for CAMPA has also refused to share evaluation
report of plantations raised in the last five years, 2010-2015. The department
has also not supplied information about circle-wise infrastructure development
and expenditure on plantations under CAMPA during the period.
"The
public information officer (PIO) has not only violated the RTI Act but has
directed us to ask for the information from respective forest circles.
Interestingly, Van Bhavan, the headquarters of the state forest department,
cannot say that it doesn't have information. If it has no information, then who
is monitoring plantations under CAMPA?" asked Prabhune. He said that
denial of information simply means hiding failure of plantations done by the
forest department under CAMPA in the past.
One of the
evaluation reports with TOI of 2008 CAMPA plantations in the rains, which were
evaluated in March 2015, states that not even a single plantation was excellent
out of the 58 sites.
"There
should be transparency. The department has a separate evaluation wing and it
cannot say the information is not available. Audit report on plantations are
also prepared. Asking to apply separately to all circles to get information
mean waste of time and money," Prabhune added. The RTI activist has
decided to appeal against the forest department.
Interestingly,
the RTI comes ahead of 2 crore tree plantation, which is being showcased as a
world record. The questions being raised is, why is the forest department,
which is taking a lead in planting 2 crore saplings, hiding the success of
previous plantations?
TOI has
earlier published several reports on how money 'grew on trees' for field staff
under plantation schemes. In 2013, the mega scheme of 100 crore plantations was
a big failure. The then Congress-NCP government's drive was part of a five-year
project to plant 500 crore trees from 2012-2017. However, owing to technical
reasons and lack of space, the plan was curtailed to 20 crore saplings.
Of the 20
crore, forest department and Forest Development Corporation of Maharashtra
(FDCM) planted over 7.71 crore saplings in 75,322 hectare area, while all the
other departments were to plant 12 crore. However, they failed to achieve even
the curtailed target of 20 crore plantations, and only 16 crore were planted.
The government had ordered a third party audit to verify how many plantations
are alive. But the report was never made public.
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