NEW DELHI: A new report on government’s plantation drives has found that most of the plantations are carried out on forest areas which are already supporting native trees and vegetation. These plantations are in fact replacing forest trees with commercial timber species such as teak, eucalyptus, bamboo and others. Moreover, the plantations are often encroaching on forest dwellers’ land in violation of the forest rights act which gives forest communities the right to use forest resources, to conserve and to live in forests.The “Impact of Compensatory Afforestation on Land and Forest Rights” an interim report compiled by various organisations working on forest rights found that 70% of the plantations have been taken up on “degraded” forest lands instead of degraded non-forest lands.All these plantations were taken up under the compensatory afforestation project which is meant to compensate the loss of forests to mining, industries, infrastructure and other development projects, mainly by raising plantations. Apart from the costs for compensatory plantations, the government also collects the net present value (NPV) of ‘diverted’ forests and a range of other funds from user agencies (companies and government departments) who carry out the development projects in forest areas.The researchers analysed data collected by the Indian School of Business on compensatory afforestation projects in 10 states. Data for 2479 compensatory afforestation projects was assessed from the e-green watch website—the projects cover an area of 63, 628 ha taken up at the cost of Rs 165 crores between 2007 and 2017. More than 25% of the trees planted in these projects are of teak and eucalyptus. But there is no data on how many of these trees survived or what ecosystem services they are providing over the years.This TOI reporter had visited some compensatory afforestation sites in 2015 and 2016 to understand how forest-dwelling communities were involved in these plantations. Most communities, particularly women felt deprived because they cannot use the commercial timber varieties in any way, they prefer fruiting trees, forest shrubs and tubers.In fact, in villagers in Burlubaru in Kandhamal district were up in arms against the forest department because they had planted teak in the forest patches where Kutia Kondhs (one of the 13 particularly vulnerable tribal groups in Odisha) grew tubers, fruit, millets and other indigenous crops. There were many other villages where tribal women said their shifting cultivation plots had been destroyed to make space for plantation and that local food and fodder diversity was getting affected due to the planting of commercial varieties.“What the forest department considers to be degraded forests is actually rich in diversity. They consider it degraded just because tribals are practising shifting cultivation there bit tribals also conserve the forests and ensure there is biodiversity,” said Sanghamitra Dubey of Vasundhara and co-author of the study.Researchers documented 52 case studies of villages where compensatory afforestation had been carried out of which community forest resource rights (rights to collect minor forest produce, rights to protect and conserve the forests among others).But interviews conducted revealed that in 39 villages consent of gram sabha was not taken before raising plantations. “The plantations violate the power vested in the gram sabhas by the forest rights act, and worse, illegally restrict the rights over these lands under multiple sections of the act. The forest department follows the practice of fencing such plantations and posting guards, illegally alienating such lands from gram sabhas and tribals,” the report states.Further, a separate analysis of 26 plantations taken up in Suakati range in Keonjhar forests of Odisha through satellite imagery shows that 16 plantations encroached on cultivated areas and three had been taken up on land under shifting cultivation. Almost all affected villages are inhabited by Juangs , a particularly vulnerable tribe (PVTG).“Forcible plantations, fencing off land and restriction on collection of non-timber forest produce has adversely affected women the most who are critically dependent on the forest,” said Dubey.Under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act 2016, a corpus of more than Rs 42,000 crore is available for afforestation and wildlife protection to states so many such plantation projects will be taken up soon all over the country.