The Indian government has contributed to this fudging of facts to fool the people by reducing definition of forest cover to only 10 per cent tree cover over each hectare land. They now claim that forest cover has increased from 40.48 million hectares, in 1950-51, to more than 70.01mh in 2010-11, while actual dense forest cover is only 8.3mh now. A report.
The Central Executive Committee, AIKMS has criticised the central and state governments for using World Environment Day to wash their hands off the responsibility of having destroyed forest cover and causing environmental damage. The governments themselves are promoting plantation of saplings of commercially useful plantations like eucalyptus, teak, anwala, fruits, etc., which do not provide any forest cover, hardly fix any carbon and some like eucalyptus heavily deplete the water table.
In Allahabad, Maharashtra, coastal AP and other areas main offender of environment are clusters of coal Thermal Power Plants, which suck water and dry up rivers, reduce water table, dry up the canals, ponds, irrigation and hand pumps and will pollute the atmosphere due to lacs of quintals of ash per day.
In UP, the sand mafia is deploying machines and damaging river flow, ghats, river beds and the natural flora and fauna, fishes, crocodiles and dolphins. The forest department has allowed deforestation due to which blue bulls is damaging standing crops. The department itself has taken over Gram Sabha agricultural land to plant commercial trees which they claim they are forests.
The construction industry being promoted by the central and state governments, which too is a big polluter. It causes suspended dust particles to create smog. Even pavements have been covered with stone, which will deplete water recharging.
The Indian government has contributed to this fudging of facts to fool the people by reducing definition of forest cover to only 10 per cent tree cover over each hectare land. They now claim that forest cover has increased from 40.48 million hectares, in 1950-51, to more than 70.01mh in 2010-11, while actual dense forest cover is only 8.3mh now.
This reduction of forest cover is mainly responsible for reduction in precipitation in the plains and extremely heavy rains in the hills, where too the tree cover has been destroyed and is mainly responsible for the deluge, floods and loss of life and property, in Kosi in Bihar, Uttarakhand, Srinagar and Assam, in recent years.
It is shocking that none of the intellectuals, who participated in sapling plantation paid attention to these issues. AIKMS demands a total review of environment preservation. It demands a white paper on different types of tree cover, different levels of forest cover, water flow in rivers, atmospheric and water pollution, drying up of rivers being caused by various industries and to seek peoples’ views on them.
Pic from Net.
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