BHUBANESWAR: Working on a mission to plant around five crore saplings this year, the state government has also decided to focus on revival of over 32,000 hectare degraded forest land for ensuring a meaningful impact of the exercise.
Forest department sources said around 32,017.99 hectare degraded forest area have been identified in different districts where the plantation will be carried out in different plantation and compensatory afforestation schemes.
Two years back, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) had pulled up the State for its failure in bringing improvement to degraded forest areas through plantation activities, primarily due to the lack of a database of degraded forest and non-forest land. The CAG had also pointed out that maximum number of trees were planted along roads while the degraded patches inside the forest area were not taken up for plantation activity.
A forest official, however, said over 2.12 lakh hectare of degraded forests in the state have been revived the last three years between 2021-22 and 2023-24 through assisted natural regeneration. Besides, around 5,029 hectare of dense forest plantation and 2,756 running kilometre avenue plantation will also be taken up to improve green cover in the state.
The plantation programmes will be a part of state government’s five crore saplings plantation and distribution programme for 2024-25 fiscal. Around 2.16 crore saplings will be planted under different schemes, while another 2.80 crore saplings will be distributed.
According to forest authorities, there has been an increase in the survivability of the saplings planted in the last 10 years. The survival rate between 2019-20 and 2023-24 is in the range of 85-99 per cent compared to 70 to 85 per cent between 2014-15 and 2018-19. There has also been an increase in state’s forest cover from 58,136 square km in 2015 to 61,204.17 square km in 2021 as per the Forest Survey of India, said an official.