Apex Court Provides Fund For Afforestation, Wildlife Conservation

In a landmark decision, Supreme court of India has ensured that every year Indian government should release Rs 10 billion from the corpus for the afforestation, wildlife Conservation and for creating rural jobs.

In the year 2002, the apex court of India has ordered the Central Government to create a fund, so that the money can be used to improve the forested area of the country. Chief Justice, K.G. Balakrishna, who head the Forest Bench of Supreme Court made the annual provision for the fund which is Rs 2 billion more than the usual Rs.8 billion budgetary allocated to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests for fiscal 2009-10.

Supreme Court has made this order to create a corpus so that it can pool in all the money received from various government and non-governmental organizations who are exploiting the forest resources and executing various projects on forestland of India. Even, it has ordered the government to create a statutory Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) to utilize the fund, created to finance afforestation and wildlife conservation and rehabilitate the tribal population.

But in these seven years, Indian government has failed to enact a law to manage CAMPA. Gradually, the fund itself continued to grow and has reached Rs. 113 billion, generating an annual interest of Rs 13 billion.

In its recent decision, the Forest bench of the apex court which included Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justice Aftab Alam, ordered release of the Rs.10 billion annually out of the interest of the corpus. The bench has also ordered that all the schemes for the afforestation and wildlife conservation should be implemented in such a way that sufficient amount of rural employment can be generated. The bench has also mentioned in its decision that the every Indian state would be allocated funds from this Rs 10 billion.

The bench gave this order on a plea by the union environment ministry. which told the court that as per its earlier order last year many states have formulated their area specific programmes for afforestation and wildlife conservation.
The ministry’s plea, endorsed by a court-appointed panel, known as the Central Empowered Committee, was allowed by the court.

The court also ordered annual auditing by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India of the manner in which the fund is utilised.