Is India’s tree cover deficient?

Are Indians not environment conscious? Are we the worst in terms of tree cover per person? These questions disturbed me a lot, seeing this social media viral flyer. India has the least tree cover; just 28 trees per person as depicted in this picture. Is the situation alarming? With 10163 trees per head, Canada has the highest tree density, followed by Greenland at 4964 per person. Let’s try to analyze this dismal outcome of India’s green efforts. Is this method relevant to compare the global data? Statistical methods are strange and difficult to comprehend. I learnt a few statistical methods during my studies. It was a difficult subject for me, at least. Mostly the data analysis is done on random samples or opinion polls. Sometimes even our exit polls go wrong due to the wrong choice of samples or inadequate data. But to understand the people’s preference for a product or to rate a film, we take such random methods only. Why? Even a sentence in court may take away a life by majority voting by a bench of sitting judges. A YouTube channel becomes viral if a large number of views are made. These are some examples. I wish to add the disclaimer ‘without prejudice’ for differing with statistical methods.  After all, even scientific facts differ with time. The reason why I differed with this tree data is as follows. Firstly, quality cannot be compromised with quantity. Forest departments and Tree Acts always advocate, ‘plant 10 trees when you cut one tree’. Is it correct? Could 10 tree saplings compensate for the oxygen yield of a 50-year-old tree, felled? But we all see the infrastructure industries ruthlessly felling or cutting trees and making compensatory plantation for name’s sake. There is no post plantation care or audit and accountability. For instance, let us quote an example. Say there are 100 breads, to be distributed to 10 persons. We can say that each would get on an average of 10 breads. If the same is divided among 100 people, then each will get only one bread. Similarly, if there are 1000 trees in a country with a 100-person population, then the per head tree cover will be 10 per capita. If the same country with the same number of trees has 10000 people, the per capita tree cover will be reduced to 0.1. How can this comparison prove the country’s greening effort? Further, China has a Tree Cover of 130 while India has 28. But we cannot forget the population is more or less equal. So, should we say that China is making a greening effort which is 4 times that of India? It is also a wrong comparison because China has a land mass two and a half times that of India. Greenland and Canada are not thickly populated countries. These countries, naturally, will have more green cover. About a few centuries back, until Columbus discovered the USA, it was not at all inhabited. Today, the entire world is invading the States, which is probably the reason why restrictions on immigration are getting stricter. Therefore, such comparisons will prove futile to achieve global standards. India has better resources than most other countries. India has only about 25% forest cover now, we must try to make it 33%. In other words, making it one third of our land mass must be our target.

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