Centre restricts use of forest funds

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, October 17

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change have tweaked the guidelines on the utilisation of the money collected by the Compensatory Afforestation Funds Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA).

The authority manages the corpus collected from industries and state government agencies that use forest land for projects. These funds are to be used by states to implement agro-forestry in non-forest land to compensate for felled trees in forests. The authority accumulates around Rs 6,000 crore annually and over Rs 60,000 crore is lying unspent in the CAMPA funds. Punjab’s share in the corpus is around Rs 700 crore.

A senior government functionary said the new guidelines, effective from this month, defined the parameters on the utilisation of the funds, specifically for CAMPA-related activities. While specifying that the corpus could not be used to defend litigation not related to CAMPA, utilisation of the funds for the construction of office infrastructure and operational purposes had been defined.

Now onwards, under the new guidelines, each state has been asked to create its own account to collect the corpus generated under the compensatory afforestation, instead of the funds being deposited at the Central level.

In the light of the recent orders of the Supreme Court on October 8, rebuking the Punjab government for diverting the Compensatory Afforestation Funds Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) funds to pay for Rs 1.11 crore as litigation in the National Green Tribunal (NGT), the guidelines become more relevant. The states have been asked to manage the litigation from its resources.

While coming down heavily on the state Forest Department for diverting the corpus to pay for lawyers’ fee, the state has been asked to reimburse the funds within two months.