Yogesh Kumar Goyal
With the onset of summer season, incidents of forest fires are also increasing continuously in different states of India. According to the data of the Forest Survey of India, from March 26 to April 1, 2022, that is, within a week, more than sixty thousand small and big cases of fire were reported in the forests of twenty nine states. This is extremely worrying.
In seven days, 17709 cases of forest fires were registered in Madhya Pradesh, 12805 in Chhattisgarh, 8920 in Maharashtra, 7130 in Odisha and 4684 in Jharkhand. Large forests of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Mizoram and Bihar have been affected more by the arson. In just eight days, 1230 incidents of fire were reported in large forests. According to the report of Forest Survey of India, with rising mercury, an average of 234 cases of forest fires are being registered every hour.
It is worth noting that recently the terrible fire that broke out in the Sariska Tiger Reserve of Rajasthan was brought under control after several days of hard work. Apart from Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir, several acres of forest have been destroyed in Himachal as well. In Madhya Pradesh’s Umaria Tiger Reserve, in just ten days, forest fires broke out at 121 places. In Uttarakhand, the process of smoldering of forests continues, where since February 15, hundreds of fire incidents have damaged 250 hectares of forest area.
According to the Indian Meteorological Department, fire spreads rapidly in the forests in summer. The kind of weather it is at this time, this danger increases even more. In March this year, there was a deficit of 71 per cent in rainfall. This is the reason that the lack of rain due to the rapidly rising mercury has led to the lack of small reservoirs in the forests and the incidents of fire are increasing.
In fact, the complete drying of forests increases the risk of fire. Sometimes when the forest fires reach the surrounding villages, the situation becomes quite frightening. Last year, in a similar horrific fire in the forests of Uttarakhand, six cowsheds, several houses including wooden stalls were burnt to ashes in Chaukhutia of Almora and the fire could be extinguished with the help of helicopters.
Forest fires cause huge damage to the forest ecosystem and biodiversity. According to the Zoological Survey Department, the existence of more than four and a half thousand species of animals has been endangered due to fire in the forests of Uttarakhand. The huge loss caused by forest fires to the environment as well as forest wealth, has to bear the brunt of it for a long time and such loss keeps increasing from year to year.
In the last four decades, apart from the extinction of many species of plants and animals in India, the number of animals and birds has also come down to a third and one of the reasons for this has been forest fires. The enormous amount of carbon that reaches the atmosphere due to forest fires is a much bigger and more serious threat.
Fire incidents are increasing in the forest areas across the country despite the use of techniques other than continuous monitoring from satellites to prevent the loss of forest wealth due to fire. According to data from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the number of forest fires has tripled during the three years between 2017 and 2019. In 2016, more than thirty seven thousand incidents of forest fires were registered across the country, which increased to more than one lakh in 2018.
The Forest Survey of India was started in the year 2004 with the help of a satellite of the American space agency NASA, to alert the state governments of the incidents of forest fires. In the year 2017, with the help of sensor technology, monitoring of such incidents was started even at night. In view of the increasing incidents of fire, an initiative was also taken to strengthen the monitoring mechanism of the states by launching a comprehensive forest fire monitoring program in January 2019.
Although these steps have had some success in reducing the incidents of forest fires in some states, but the situation is still not improving in some states including Uttarakhand. Despite all the technical help, every year there is a terrible fire in the forests on a large scale, when everything seems bent on swallowing and the forest department seems helpless, then the concern is bound to increase.
What is more worrying is that even today there is a lack of seriousness within the governments and administration regarding the incidents of forest fires. After the horrific fire in Uttarakhand in 2019, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) was also forced to take a stern comment. The NGT had then said that the environment ministry and other authorities take incidents of forest fires lightly. Many times the fire in the forests does not happen naturally, but animal smugglers also carry out such incidents.
In the forests of Madhya Pradesh, people set fire to bushes to extract Mahua. If we talk about natural fire incidents, then change in weather, drought, soil erosion are the main reasons for this. Especially in hilly areas, pine trees are in abundance. Environmental experts consider it to be mismanagement of forests that about 17 percent of the country’s forest area is full of pine trees. Actually, these types of trees grow easily in the weakening forest area.
The biggest disadvantage of pine trees is that they catch fire very quickly and secondly, they do not allow other trees with broad leaves to flourish in their area. Since there is no moisture in pine forests, so even the slightest spark can burn such forests to ashes. Talking about the forests of Uttarakhand alone, an average of 23.66 lakh metric tonnes of pine leaves fall there every year, which becomes a major reason for the spread of fire. Due to the layer of these leaves in the forests, rain water is not able to enter the ground. Although emphasis is being laid on taking pine leaves as a resource and using them to make electricity, coal etc., but a lot still needs to be done in this direction.
One of the major reasons for the failure to easily control the increasing incidence of forest fires in India is that the forest dwellers in the forest areas are now indifferent towards forest conservation. This is largely because of the new forest policies. Although thousands of forest guards are appointed for the protection and care of forests, but it is not so easy and easy for them to protect the forests spread over an area of millions of hectares.
Therefore, it is necessary that efforts should be made to establish their relationship with the forests by running a public awareness campaign to the people living around the forests and their villages, so that they consider the forests as companions of their happiness and sorrows and for their protection every moment together. Look standing.