DEFINITION OF FOREST

About:

• States, having well established forest departments, are in a better position, rather than Union Environment Ministry, to understand their own forests and needs, and should frame criteria for their forests; criteria so finalised by a State need not be subject to approval by Union Environment Ministry.
  
  
• The freedom to define land, not already classified as forests by the Centre or State records, as forest has been the prerogative of the States since 1996 and stems from a Supreme Court order.
  
  

1996 Supreme Court judgment:

• The 1996 Supreme Court judgment expanded the definition of forest to include lands that were already notified by the Centre as forests, that appear in government records as forests as well as those that fell in the “dictionary definition” of forest.
  
  
• The latter clause allows the States to evolve their own criteria and define tracts of land as forest, and these would then be bound by forest conservation laws.
  
  
• An all-encompassing definition of forest wasn’t possible for India because the country has 16 different kinds of forest. A tract of grassland in one State might qualify in one region as forest, but not in another.