MONITORING STATE PLANTATIONS

Chapter 1
Information gaps

It is my intention to publish more chapters to this webpage as I make progress with my analysis of the compensatory afforestation activities undey way in areas of my interest in India. For those of you who would like to see it first, the link to a map of 294 plantation sites as they were reported by concerned authorities in Saharanpur's Shivalik Forest Division is provided at the end of this research note (scroll down, down, down). As of today, October 22nd, 2021, no "ground truthing" of the data has been completed by my collaborators or myself - meaning that no one actually went to the field to check whether the reported geographic information is valid and indeed corresponds to thriving plantations. That ground monitoring should begin in the earnest, however, and I am looking forward to share the results. I am also seeking your opinion about this project called "Monitoring (the) State('s) Plantations", mainly what additional issues I should raise besides those evoked below and where do you think I should take this new pet project next. Please drop me an email paquet@wisc.edu or write your comment in the box below. Thank you!

In India, since 1992, private and public agencies must apply for environmental clearance before they start fresh infrastructural or economic development projects requiring the diversion of forest lands to any other purpose besides ecological conservation. In the event that clearance is granted, the agencies shall also transfer a sum of money calculated on a tree-per-tree, hectare-per-hectare basis to a central fund for compensatory afforestation (CA). For the past two decades, CA is performed under the aegis of each state's Compensatory Afforestation Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), an entity that is, ecological services to the population aside, and in strict financial terms, the ultimate beneficiary of the central fund, but too often at the expense of local stakeholders, as I aim to show ultimately. CA's current iteration is not people-oriented. Communities that rely on continued access to forest resources for their livelihoods have suffered from being excluded from plantations - both physically, as new enclosures are created around freshly planted tree saplings in order to protect them, and politically, considering what little or no say they might have in the decision-making processes and management of CA monies and activities. That the locals who are at the receiving end of CA works get accurate and timely information about the plantations that keep cropping up around them would be the least thing that state authorities could do for them, if only to raise citizens engagement with state plantation schemes, but as this research note highlights, information sharing is a big miss as far as plantations are concerned.

The e-GreenWatch Portal is an online resource and an e-governance tool of the Government of India that should make CA-related information accessible to the general public. It is also the source of the data I used to make the map linked below. The information available on the Portal's website ranges from financial details to maps supposed to show the location of plantation sites (and let it be noted that artificial regeneration continues to be the strategy of choice of state authorities, for all CA, even though its associated costs are high, and its efficacity has been disproved by recent scientific research, including this paper published in Nature Sustainability). Monitoring plantations is something that has become more challenging this year as the maps that used to be embedded in the e-Green Watch Portal, that allowed non experts to visualize the geolocation of plantation sites at the mere click of a mouse, or at a finger's touch on the screen, were inexplicable taken down. (Hence my desire to share at least one map of plantations, and raise a set of question regarding state accountability in the domain of compensatory afforestation as quickly as possible.) Now deprived of visualization tools, the members of the public who wish to be informed about the in situ progress of CA schemes have to download the KLM files hosted on the Portal, laboriously process them one by one (a task that is complicated by the fact that the KMLs currently contain useless HTML code that corrupts them, and that needs to be removed before they can be opened), and finally import the files contents in My Map, Google Earth, or any other GIS free- or software.

If these initial problems can be solved with the right application of skills and resources, it should be recalled that even the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has acknowledged that a large percentage (as high as 70%) of the geographic information on the web Portal is incorrect, based on reports from the Forest Survey of India (FSI). And the situation could even be worse, because the FSI did not go the extra mile(s) to "ground-truth" the data. It conducted its review remotely and could therefore only compare the total number and area size of plantation sites from the KMLs (which are represented as individual polygons on a map in GIS softwares) against the textual information that was supplied in a separate form by the team in-charge of the plantation works. As the Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment, Forests and Climate Change remarked earlier this year in a statement that, knowingly or unknowingly, undermined the trust that remained in CAMPA's use of its e-governance tools, "there was no mechanism to check either the credibility of the claims made by forest officers for having planted a given number of plants at a site and the number of plants which had survived after a certain period of time." Still, I stubbornly persisted in believing that I could learn one or two new thing from my analysis of the geographic information about CA activities in Saharanpur's Shivalik Forest Division. After all, this was the year of a pandemic, and my work too had to be performed remotely. However, as I soon found out, the KML files I wanted to work with posed many more problems than I had ever expected.

First, a small number of polygons representing plantation sites exhibited perplexing anomalies. One polygon in particular stretched more than 5,000 km only to land in cold waters north of Russia. That one I eventually downsized to a small 10-ish-hectare square, partly saving location by preserving the sides that espoused the lay of the land, but only at the cost of area or extent - a datum that did not make much sense anyway (whereas 10 hectares is the most common area size across the dataset). I simply could not imagine planting trees through China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia to the Arctic seas.

Several pairs of polygons looked like an hourglass - simply picture two inverted triangles attached together by a corner. This characteristic alignment of two inverted triangles could only be the result of a mistake in the sequential order of the GPS coordinates used to trace the polygons. Placed in the right order, four points give a rectangle, but mix up this order before tracing between points, and it's likely that two opposite sides of the rectangle end up crossing each other like a X - or two inverted triangles.

The other major issue I encountered in the data was an avalanche of copies or duplicates. If in the end I could process 296 KML files (out of the 298 listed for the Shivaliks of Saharanpur on the e-GreenWatch Portal as of October 2021, meaning only 2 files could not be retrieved), these 296 files did not translate into 296 polygons, but a staggering 810. Some individual feature were duplicated up to 11 times across the dataset. Many KMLs contained 4, 5, or more polygons (instead of one), but even those that only contained the one could also be a duplicate. Further "ground truthing" research will reveal if indeed one site was planted only once or several times over the past few years. In the meantime, for the sake of clarity, I chose to delete the duplicates on the map provided below: after all, CA should respect the "hectare-for-hectare" rule evoked earlier, and thus, planting a site twice should not count double. Also, with 294 polygons placed on the map, very close to the anticipated total of 296, I can say that I have managed to remove the duplicates with surgical precision. (Also, the total area of all polygons combined was a close match to the textually reported area in different official forms, against all my expectations.) Finally, out of all the polygons that can be viewed on my map, about 10% (but not more) had to be manually modified or slightly redrawn to solve problems created by the tendency of the features geometry to overlap.

I only expect to find more intricate issues in the future when I take this mapping exercise from the remote and the virtual realms to a more concrete and grounded approach. Using GIS technologies, and this might be the topic of this website's next "chapter", I could show that the plantations on my map have not been placed in degraded forest light they ought to under CAMPA guidelines. I also know for a fact that plantations were moved from one place to another when local stakeholders agreed to pay substantial bribes to the in-charges of the actual works. Is the data reflecting a location from the initial proposal or actualized locations after these negotiations took place, I wonder?

Data inaccuracy raises the question of state accountability. It is important to stress that the maintenance of the e-GreenWatch Portal is costly, but is it only a smokescreen to conceal ineffective artificial regeneration schemes? Not all states divulgate the financial details of CAMPA in an open and transparent manner, but those that do might provide just enough information to estimate the costs of producing and presenting the data, leaving aside any consideration for its quality for a moment. For instance, only for the financial year 2019-20 (but bear in mind that this is a recurrent expense), the state of U.P. has earmarked 1 crore rupees for the "Independent monitoring of the information" on CA works. Meanwhile, I was unable to locate previous independent reports on CA in U.P. anywhere - a serious challenge to claims of transparency made from time to time by e-GreenWatch architects and CAMPA administrators. Large amounts are spent on technology procurement too. In one year, the state of Himachal Pradesh alone has budgeted 8.2 lakh rupees for the purchase of new GPS devices (unit price quoted between 16,600 and 33,300 rupees, as per CAMPA's annual plan of operations (in H.P.), knowing that popular GPS brands, including those I saw being used in the field, are normally marketed at 8,000-10,000 rupees a pop). H.P. also maintains 2 full-time staff on its payroll only to assist with the updates on the e-GreenWatch Portal. Paid 38,000 rupees a month, they ended up uploading a only 1 new KML file in 2020, and 23 in 2019. Even the higher level of activity on the website this year does not justify such expenditure of labor. For its part, West Bengal's CAMPA hires 40 data-entry staff (not only to maintain the online Portal, but the size of this "data-entry" squad might raise eyebrows considering that this state's CAMPA only plans to artificially regenerate 275 hectares of land and apply standard protection measures to another 600). Hints of systematic mismanagement like those abound. My last example, two years ago Uttarakhand requested a CAMPA allocation of 2 crore rupees to fulfill the needs of the combined rubrics of "Evaluation and monitoring" and "Technology and Communication". A transfer to the tune of 47.75 lakh rupees was authorized, or roughly 25% of the requested amount, but then the state only spent 23.72 lakhs - half what they got and an eighth of the amount they originally asked for - as confirmed by last year's audit. By the looks of it, CA management remains irregular and improvised, information patchy, and citizen engagement difficult.

Click on this link to view a map showing the probable location of 294 plantation sites across Saharanpur Shivalik Forest Division: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1KUQqCH1TpQkcuAH5WTlGSKqRG7uN-luB&usp=sharing

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