Nagpur: In the setback to the Keen State Forest Department to issue additional horizontal band licenses (AHBS), wildlife NGOs and city-based forest protection, save ecosystems and tigers (chairs), have challenged the availability of wood prepared by the Institute of City of Wood and technology (IWST), Bengaluru.
The petition has been submitted before the MoeFcc Regional Office.
In accordance with the APEX court order, AHBS licenses are issued by the State Level Committee (SLC) based on wood availability reports.
SLC has been on June 15, 2017, asks IWST to prepare wood availability reports.
However, even before the entrance report, SLC was led by the Agrawal UK Ex-PCCF on July 23, 2018, issued a 50 AHBS license.
The report was delivered to the state government in 2020.
However, it was challenged by the Director of the Tejas Parshivnikar seat through his lawyer Manish Jeswani on the grounds that IWST did not have a mandate to prepare a reports on the availability of wood (tar) for Maharashtra.
Parshivnikar has proposed that there are no transparent procedures or requests for proposals (RFP) are invited to prepare technical and key documents such as tar, and there is no input from anything else taken from the main forestry institutions such as the Indian Forest Research Institute (Frii), and forests Indian Survey (FSI), Dehradun.
The petition stated that IWST reports opposed the decisions and direction of the APEX court issued for SLC regarding the assessment of wood availability.
Tar is not scientific, mechanical, and based on extrapolation numbers and numbers, which are not permitted, he said.
The applicant accused the report was prepared only with the intention of providing improper benefits to Sawmill, Veneers, and timber-based industries deliberately ignore SC instructions.
Technically, the study of the availability of wood must be done by putting a sample plot in the source area.
But IWST reports connect the availability of wood in the forest depot and instead of work plans, data from the depot is collected.
The report itself acknowledged that the work plan for all divisions was not available for this study.
If a work plan is not available, this research must be done by putting the sample plot.
This report is wrong because half of the wood stands in the forest is not taken into account.
In addition, the applicant accused the report did not provide species-wise and availability of wooden agro-climate wood.
Forest depots can never be seen as wood ‘sources’ as understood in the guidelines.
Data sent by sawmills are taken at nominal value and no methodology adopted to check the validity of the data sent.
The biennial ‘forest status’ published by FSI has wise data of authentic countries, which are also not used.
Therefore, the scientific basis of this report is very questionable, if not wrong.
Wood judgments from trees outside the forest (TOF) have been done by surveying saws, which are wrong because of the possibility of proper wood separation from the source far.
IWST reports clearly recognize that data from sawmills provides an overview of total timber consumption.
Therefore, sawmill surveys provide consumption patterns, and not wood availability.
This report lacks statistics, said petition.
Setback to the forest department as a challenge for NGOs for wood availability reports
