The Union environment, forests and climate change ministry has constituted an 11-member committee to revamp the Indian Forest Act, 1927.
It is chaired by the Director General of Forests.
The panel has four senior forest officials from the ministry on board along with the head of forestry departments of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Manipur.
It also has three non-government experts on board. The three are Ravi Singh, secretary-general of the non-profit wildlife group WWF, Sanjay Upadhayay a Delhi-based environmental lawyer and Shankar Srivastava a government-empanelled lawyer for the Bhopal bench of the National Green Tribunal.
The committee formed with the approval of the minister shall “Look into various aspects regarding amendment in the Indian Forest Act, 1927”.
Forest governance is regulated by three central laws in India. The Indian Forest Act, 1927, the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, and the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
The first deals primarily with demarcating, settling and classifying forest lands, regulation of timber and other forest produce and destruction of forest property.
The Forest Conservation Act, 1980, deals with diversion of forest lands for industry and other purposes.
The latest of the three, the Forest Rights Act, gives back rights, powers and duties to manage traditional forest lands to tribals and other forest dwellers, which were taken over during and after the colonial era under previous laws.
With forest land being a concurrent subject, some states have their own amended equivalents of the Indian Forest Act.
