BHOPAL: Speakers at a workshop on "Environmental data availability and decision-making process" organised by the Indian Institute of Forest Management here on Friday were unanimous in their view that data is essential for sound management of the environment.

They also shared the view that available and future data is in danger of not being fair and that it is grossly inadequate.

One of the panellists said that data should not be put on the shelf but has to be translated into outcomes.

Another panellist said: "The challenge is to use data on a proactive basis by ensuring that those who have the expertise (to collect data) become active players in the decision-making process."

National Judicial Academy Director G. Mohan Gopal, who chaired the session, said that the real question that needed to be addressed was linked to "redistribution of power and social change".

Dr. Gopal said there was a strong linkage between availability of information and robustness of effective statistical systems when it comes to informing those who make laws and enforce them. He stressed the need to build up an environmental statistical system. "The number of litigations have gone up and there are more declaratory suits and injunctions due to executive failure to comply with law and also because the society is changing." Another major conflict was linked to land and natural resources, he added.

Introducing the workshop theme, Professor Madhu Verma said there had to be an elevation of allocation for the forestry sector in the Eleventh Plan period.

Former Director-General of IIFM, J. B. Lal said that ecology could not be segregated from economics. He said matter and energy and all forms of life depend on forests, crop-land, fisheries/water bodies and grass lands. He told the statistical officers attending the workshop to respond positively and remain sensitive to data. About ecological balance, he said: "We use this term understanding very little about it."

Dr. Lal underlined the importance of integrated resource management and said that no system could be viewed in isolation.

The chairman and founding Trustee of Sambhavna Trust, an NGO working for the cause of the Bhopal gas victims, Satinath Sarangi talked of environmental crimes that were leading to the disappearance of many indigenous human populations, dissipation of forests and threatening marine life. "The effects of environmental crimes are much closer to us than we thought," he said, adding that the basic data, including the details of the gas that leaked from the Union Carbide plant more than 20 years ago in Bhopal and how many citizens were killed or have been affected, was still not available.

The State Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, P.B. Gangopadhyay, said that grazing and fuel wood, which is tangible and taken out on a daily basis from forests, is not quantified. "These are economic activities that are not getting reflected in our GDP," he said, adding that even though 55 to 75 per cent of the country's energy requirement was being supplied by forests, it was not getting accounted for in the energy policy and the tragedy was that the energy policy remained oblivious of the energy removal from the forest sector.

Stressing the need for collection of data to assess how much Fuel wood people were consuming, Mr. Gangopadhyaya said that the data has to be real.

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