Editorial
Forest resources up for grabs!
Who will guard the guards?
There is very little that the public can do if those that the state employs to guard its wealth involve themselves in plundering the same. Such a case, of what can only be described as daylight robbery, was exposed in a report front-paged on Monday in this newspaper. It shows the brazen manner in which a social forestry project has become the object of unmitigated plundering by the staff of the forest department.
The project was initiated in 2002 in three chars on the Padma under Paba upazilla of Rajshahi. And it stemmed from good intentions, one presumes, of providing employment and other benefits accruing from such a project, to the villagers who had taken up habitation a decade ago in the then newly-emerged but barren chars. The three chars had emerged nearly decade ago and where the forest department had planted about two lakh trees in about 100 hectares although it was warned by the water development board that these shoals may not hold out for long, being subject to erosion. And most were timber trees of various categories. So far so good!
But what defies rationale is that some members of the same department, in league with local gangsters, have managed to fell almost 15000 trees, thus depriving those that participated in the project of their entitled share as well as the state of a large amount of revenue. What is even more annoying and unacceptable is the fact that the DFO is apparently unaware that so many trees have been felled in the last six months. The locals do not dare to go to the police for fear of retribution.
The above incident is fairly representative, in so far as the forest department is concerned, of the problems that ail the sector. It has exposed the odious connection that exists between a section of the forest officials and local influential people, linked to one big party or the other, engaging in illegal timber trade, denuding the land of forest coverage and the government of revenue.
As it is, whereas ecologically 25 percent of land should be under forest cover, we have now only about 7 percent of forested land. And this in spite of the planned afforestation scheme of the government. And the plundering in the three chars amply illustrates why the afforestation venture has not been fully successful. There have been several reports of how vast swathes of forests have been laid bare and how the highways have been divested of newly matured trees by the unholy nexus of the powerful and the corrupt.
We hope that the ministry of forests would take steps to not only prevent loss of national resource but make examples of the staff of the forest department that collude in the destruction of it.
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