CHENNAI: The Union Ministry of Forests and Environment has prepared a plan to achieve sustainable forestry development, Bipin Behari, Deputy Inspector-General of Forests, said on Tuesday.

Addressing a workshop here, Dr. Behari said the plan identified five themes: protecting forest resources; improving forest productivity; reducing demand; strengthening policy and institutional frameworks; and expanding the forest area.

Inaugurating the four-day workshop on `Restoration, Management and Rehabilitation of Degraded and Secondary Tropical Forests in India,' Minster of State for Environment and Forests Namo Narain Meena said forest resources were under heavy pressure from rural and urban demands, so there was an increasing need for restoring the degraded and secondary tropical forests. Realising the need to increase forest productivity, the Government had adopted the Joint Forestry Management for sustainable development of forests. The National Forest Policy, 1988, also laid stress on the maintenance of environment and stability of the ecosystem, besides forest productivity.

Tamil Nadu Minister of Forests N. Selvaraj said to improve tree cover, the Government launched an afforestation programme in 1997. This helped to improve 4,800 sq km of degraded forests. The second phase of the programme would be implemented in 135 villages to improve 45,250 hectares of degraded forests. At the end of the second phase, 1.75 lakh hectares of degraded forests would have been improved.

J.C. Kala, Director-General of Forests and Special Secretary, Ministry of Forests and Environment, said the 10th Plan had set a target of achieving 25 per cent forest and tree cover by 2007 and 33 per cent by 2012. It was estimated that to achieve 33 per cent, an additional 31.46 million hectares of forest and tree cover was required.

C.K. Sreedharan, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Tamil Nadu, said strategies to arrest and reverse forest degradation had been the core of the forest policy for the past 25 years.

The social forestry programme was launched to ease the pressure on forests, making available the firewood, fodder and small timber to rural communities from village commons and private farmlands.

The country's social forestry effort was perhaps the largest in the world as 20 million hectares of plantations had been raised over 12 years since from 1985.

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