The Hindu : National : Centre to focus on `greening' India

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 15, 2004

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National

Centre to focus on `greening' India

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, APRIL 14. The Government has launched a massive project to increase the green cover in India to over 33 per cent by 2012. The "Greening India" Project aims to cover 1.7 lakh villages in the vicinity of forests inhabited by tribal and other poor sections of society. It will focus on issues of land degradation and poverty, according to the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, K.C. Pant.

Speaking at the launch of regional programmes of the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry here today, Mr. Pant said the project was launched after the potential of wastelands was recognised under the 10th Five Year Plan to increase the green cover to one-third of the total land-mass of the country in the next eight years. India had 107 million hectares of degraded lands, of which 64 million hectares were wasteland. These were generally underutilised. The greening programme primarily aimed at enhancing the economic benefits of reforestation to all stakeholders through the cultivation of economically valuable species such as bio-fuel sources such as jatropha and bamboo and medicinal plants. This would also increase the non-farm income of the rural population and solve the twin problems of poverty and unemployment.

Mr. Pant said the population pressure, both of human and livestock, was increasingly affecting the natural resources, leading to a decrease in the per capita availability of environmental resources. Environmental degradation and the resulting economic loss fed on each other and threw population into a downward spiral of livelihood stress. Agro forestry systems could provide the much-needed solution as it was a multiple function land use system capable of yielding all livelihood necessities.

R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government, expressed concern over the adverse impact of the large-scale carbon emissions into the atmosphere on the climate.

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