Topic: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
1) India’s National Mission for a Green India assumes arbitrary targets that are rooted in habits of neo-colonial governance rather than “sound science”. Comment.(250 words)
Why this question
The article examines the goals of the National Mission for a Green India and brings out its limitations.
Directive word
Comment- here we have to express our knowledge and understanding of the issue and form an overall opinion thereupon.
Key demand of the question.
The question wants us to express our knowledge and understanding of the National Mission for a Green India and express our opinion as to whether the mission has arbitrary targets which are rooted in neo-colonial governance.
Structure of the answer
Introduction– write a few introductory lines about the National Mission for a Green India. E.g The Green India Mission is one of eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change and aims at “protecting, restoring and enhancing India’s diminishing forest cover and responding to climate change by a combination of adaptation and mitigation measures”.
Body-
Discuss how the missions targets are rooted in neo-colonial governance and are devoid of any scientific backing. E.g
- “Ostensibly aimed at improving forest-based livelihoods, the initiative has all the qualities of past forestry efforts in India, which have historically performed a reverse role: disinheriting forest-rooted populations,”
- Given that forest cover of Europe in the colonial period was estimated at roughly one-third, and that this region serves as the source of knowledge, law and statecraft,afforestation rate of 30-33% became the widely accepted minimum for civilization.
- Exported to India, this targeted minimum, it can easily be concluded, became a conceptual ghost that haunted successive generations of forest policymakers, whose goals might have been diverse… but whose mechanism represent a disordered form of repetitive compulsion, imposed over and over on arid and semi-arid ecosystems and the local communities.
- Commitment to fixed rates of forest cover encourages tree plantations in “ecologically inappropriate sites and conditions”.
- Again, afforestation typically extends the “authority” of Indian state forest departments in a way that is mostly “at the expense of local livelihoods” rather than in “support of them.”
- One problem of plantation ecologies in India, according to the study, is “enthusiasm for fast growing species and exotic and invasive species, planted in the name of increasing land cover dedicated to ‘forest’.”
Conclusion– based on your discussion, form a fair and a balanced conclusion on the given issue.
