DELHI: Last week, India's environment ministry overhauled the process it follows for identifying forests where industrial activities can be permitted.Instead of using six parameters -- forest type, biological richness, wildlife value, density of forest cover, integrity of the landscape, and hydrological value – for deciding whether a forestland can be given over for, say, mining , ministry officials told the media that the ministry would henceforth use four parameters.According to media reports, ministry officials said biological richness would be dropped as that is accounted for under wildlife value. Similarly, the ministry clubbed hydrological value with forest cover.In the process, the ministry has mixed up concepts which, as forest ecologist Harini Nagendra says, are related but not replaceable. Take the decision to merge hydrological value and forest cover. According to Nitin Rai , a researcher with Bangalore-based Ashoka Trust for Research into Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), “wetlands would get marginalised in such an evaluation, as would water courses in open habitats and arid environments.” He adds, “The relationship between forests and hydrological services is not linear. While forests are important for hydrological processes you cannot assume that the the lack of forests means low hydrological value.”Agrees TR Shankar Raman , a biologist with Mysore-based Nature Conservation Foundation : “A grid could score low on forest cover, but the forest/grassland that is there may be the only source of water for entire villages. So hydrological value will be high.”Or take the bit about replacing biological diversity with wildlife values. Comments Rai, “It is a travesty to conflate 'biodiversity richness' with 'wildlife'. The conventional definition of wildlife really is large mammals and birds as given in the annexures to the WLPA. Biodiversity on the other hand includes all life forms and even those that are not found in forests alone such as agro-biodiversity, all of which are important to record in any exercise that seeks to evaluate species richness. So while biodiversity would include all species, wildlife is a far more restrictive term.”To understand the Ministry's perspective, ET met SS Garbyal, director-general (forests). The resulting conversation clarified some issues but triggered further questions elsewhere.According to Garbyal, what the new process means is that, henceforth, “While the ministry will use four parameters for evaluating whether a forestland can be diverted for non-forest use (like mining), it can continue to use the other two parameters whenever required.”Take hydrology. There are two issues here. One, it is not clear if norms have been defined on when four – and when, six – parameters will be used.Two, as Garbyal says, “The information on when hydrological importance would be used as a parameter has to come from the water resources ministry. Earlier, no inputs were coming from the water resources ministry, and so we were using only five parameters while deciding on forest diversion.”Now, he says, the ministry has been asked again to provide its inputs.In his conversation with ET, Garbyal differed with media reports that the ministry has decided to subsume biological diversity under wildlife value. It is, he said, the other way around. Biological diversity will be one of the four parameters to be considered – along with forest type, integrity of landscape, and forest cover.The Indian Institute of Remote Sensing , he said, has “come out with a survey which scores India on a 0-100 scale of biological diversity.” The ministry, he said, will use that data for gauging biological diversity.Is that a good approach? According to Rai, it isn't. “IIRS is probably measuring vegetation. The assumption here is that the greener a patch, the more the diversity. However, open scrub forests, grasslands or dry deciduous forests will score low while wet evergreen forests score high. But if you look at the really threatened species, like the Indian bustard, they are all in the grasslands. You are using one indicator as a proxy for a set of unrelated qualities.”The only way to get accurate assessments, he says, is local mapping exercises. Approaches like the IIRS one, he says, mask “the enormous heterogeneity in socio-ecological systems.”Apart from these, one of the more perplexing aspects of the new process is around one number. Last week, the ministry also announced that, henceforth, any forest area coming up for clearance would be scrutinised on these four parameters on a scale of 1 to 100. If the average score of a grid exceeds 70, it would be labelled 'inviolate'. And, if a majority of grids in the area proposed for clearance are 'inviolate', the block would be labelled so.It is not clear, as Rai says, where the ministry got this number from. It is a question that even Garbyal cannot answer. When ET asked him about the origins of this number, he said: “I do not know how that number was arrived at.”According to a senior forest official, speaking to ET on the condition of anonymity, the decision to overhaul the forest clearance norms was taken in a meeting that Garbyal, the top bureaucrat in charge of India's forests, could not attend. “Even in the previous meeting before the one where the new norms were adopted”, he said, “The forest service bureaucrats asked about the rationale for this '70'. But there was no answer.”