As India heads into yet another brutal summer, forest fires rage across the central and southern states. In the last 10 days, at least 200 large forest fire points have been recorded in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The national weather office has a grim prediction—the April-June season will witness above-normal heat-wave days over the southern peninsula, the central and eastern states, and the northwestern plains.
This, in all likelihood, will further fuel wildfires unless summer rains punctuate the hot and dry season. A recent study by two scientists from Utah State University and Princeton University revealed climate change is making heat-waves more potent by slowing their progress across continents, leading to heat concentration. While this will have a detrimental impact on human health and livelihood, forests are going to bear the brunt too.
India has recorded a massive surge in forest fires in recent years. Fire points have almost doubled from the 1.24 lakh recorded in the November 2019-June 2020 season. The Forest Survey of India offers an early alert system and, under a central scheme, close to Rs 100 crore has been released to states and Union territories in last three years for fire prevention. Still, the onus of fighting forest fires is on the states, whose forest departments mostly use low-skilled protection staff during fire seasons, often on daily wages.
The fire service wings of police departments as well as state disaster response forces are also deployed during exigencies. But these are piecemeal methods to take on a crisis that is growing fast with climate change. After a parliamentary panel recommended forest fire to be included in the list of disasters tackled by the National Disaster Response Force, 150 fully-trained responders have been deployed in Guwahati, Vijayawada and Uttarakhand; but it hardly suffices.
There is need for a more comprehensive strategy involving the setting up of a vulnerability atlas, use of artificial intelligence to forecast and respond, besides building a dedicated, decentralised force across more states. More than half of India’s forests are vulnerable to occasional fires, while another 10 percent face the threat of moderately frequent to high incidence—all of it threatening to deplete some of our most effective carbon sinks. It’s about time the Centre adopted a clear plan to save our forests from deadly blazes.