Lost: 26000 sq km of forests

“The loss of forests is shown immediately in the satellite pictures during the survey, but compensatory afforestation takes 5-10 years to show up in the survey,’’ Raja said.

According to the State of Forest Report, 2003 a total of 3,90,564 sq km are under dense forest cover; open forests cover 2,87,769 sq km. The total cover is 6,78,333 sq km or 20.64 per cent.

Out of 593 districts in the country, 199 districts have less than 5 per cent forest cover. This includes 59 districts which have less than one per cent forest cover.

The Minister said the goal was to increase forest cover by five per cent by 2007 and termed it a “big challenge”. He added: “The national goal is to have 25 per cent of the country’s geographical area under forest and tree cover by 2007 and 33 per cent by 2012…”

Raja said the Centre needs to allocate to Rs 8,000 crore every year on afforestation programmes to achieve this goal. He added that the only way to do this was to enter public or private partnerships.

The forest cover is monitored with the help of the latest satellite data procured from National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad. But the report admits there are limitations to remote sensing technology for it fails to capture linear strips of forest cover along roads and canals. It is also difficult to differentiate bushy vegetation and certain crops like sugarcane and cotton from tree canopy.