Facing a paucity of land for carrying out yearly plantation drives and compensatory afforestation, the divisional forest department has embarked upon a plan free up about 200-250 hectares of land from old plantation and reuse it for fresh dense plantation over the next 10 years.
Officials said they are drawing up the necessary plans, which will soon be sent to the Centre for approval and necessary clearances.
Reserved forest areas are declared by the central government, following a procedure of public hearing and survey under the provisions of Indian Forest Act. Any non-forest activity is strictly prohibited in reserved forest areas except with the permission of the central government.The land ownership vests with the forest department.
According to district records, the area under reserved forests comprise 607.74 hectares in Modinagar range and 43.3 hectares in the Ghaziabad range. Officials said these reserved areas have been saturated since the past five to six years and that has held up plantation drives and compensatory afforestation activities, which have to be taken up in lieu of trees felled for infrastructure projects.
“Because the reserved forests have remained saturated since the past five or six years, plantation drives and compensatory afforestation (CA) activities had to be taken up in other districts. We are working on a plan to be sent to the centre for approval. Under this, different patches of reserved forests will be freed up and made available for fresh plantation. The plan is likely to be ready by June and soil test reports will also be incorporated,” said Manish Singh, divisional forest officer (DFO).
Due to saturation, the department took up compensatory afforestation for the Delhi-Meerut Expressway project in Jalaun district (about 430km away), while the compensatory plantation for the proposed Kanwar Marg project on the Upper Ganga Canal has been proposed in Lalitpur district (about 550km away). It is estimated that about 22,000 trees will be felled in Ghaziabad for the Kanwar Marg project, officials said.
The officials said a majority of land under Ghaziabad’s reserved forest have prosopis juliflora (vilayti kikar) which is primarily planted for improving the quality of barren lands.
According to the data from the forest department, only 5,600 trees were planted between 2017 and 2019 as compensatory afforestation for want of land. The total number of saplings planted as part of compensatory afforestation from 2012 to 2019 is 38,645.
“We estimate that we can free up about 200-250 hectares from vilayti kikar plantation and we can plant other trees there. This freed up land will be available for the next 10 years and every year, we can take up plantations on 15-20 hectares. Over the past few years, for the annual plantation drives, we had to take land from other departments to meet our targets,” the DFO said.
This season, the district has a target to plant about 983,000 trees. It planted 1,232,879 saplings in 2022-23, 1,127,585 in 2021-22 and 704,129 saplings in 2020-21 as part of the annual plantation drive.
“The green cover in the district is on decline due to development of infrastructure projects and this is in spite of heavy plantations taken up during annual drives. The plantation sites should be geotagged and focus should be more on preserving the saplings so that they convert to trees,” said Akash Vashishtha, a city-based environmentalist and lawyer.
According to the “state of forest” report released by the Forest Survey of India (FSI) in January 2022, Ghaziabad district, which has a total geographic area of 1,179 square kilometres (sqkm), only 25.22 sqkm is under forest cover, which works out to about 2.14% of the total area, which is the same as the assessment in 2019. However, in 2019 the FSI report said the forest cover had declined as compared to 2017 when the coverage was 2.21% of the total geographical area.
