Govt. sets up 11-member panel to revamp forest law

TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi-The Union environment, forests and climate change ministry has constituted an 11-member committee to revamp the Indian Forest Act, 1927. The panel has not been given a detailed mandate, but the first meeting of the panel suggests it has considered revamping the forest governance regime in the country.

The government is yet to announce the formation of the committee in public. News of the government planning to review the law was leaked earlier and the minister, Anil Madhav Dave, had said the idea was to make forests more productive under new laws.

The panel was constituted on September 23 and has already had one meeting of some of the members. It has four senior forest officials from the ministry on board along with the head of forestry departments of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Manipur.

It also has three non-government experts on board: Ravi Singh, secretary-general of the non-profit wildlife group WWF; Sanjay Upadhayay, a Delhi-based environmental lawyer; and Shankar Srivastava, a government-empanelled lawyer for the Bhopal bench of the National Green Tribunal. It is to be chaired by the country’s senior-most forest officer, the director general of forests.