Indian Forest Service officers from various Indian States are attending a two-day workshop on national working plan code 2014 at the Forest Research Institute here. The workshop under the aegis of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change was inaugurated by the FRI director Dr PP Bhojvaid.
More than 30 IFS officers from Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Nagaland, Manipur, Punjab, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Telangana, Karnataka and Maharashtra among others are attending the workshop.
It should be noted that the MoEF&CC has framed new national working plan code 2014 for scientific management of forests as per present day requirement in the context of changing world environmental scenario. In the Indian context the Forest department is responsible for overall management and governance of forests. For effective management decisions the department requires different spatial and non-spatial information in a standard format.
Spatial information includes administrative boundaries, road, settlements, crime locations, vegetation type, terrain, soil etc whereas non-spatial information includes different records available with forest department like village micro planning documents, working plan, plantation records, Joint Forest Management (JFM) committee records, forest village census etc.
The workshop provides a frame for IFS officers to exchange experience and discuss various approaches for the assessment of the new national working plan code 2014 to ensure conservation and safety of the forests and environment.
Dr Ajay Kumar from the MOEF&CC addressed the participants about the implementation of the new code. later, MP Singh from FRI gave an overview of the new code, Rajesh Kumar from the Forest Survey of India made a presentation on forest resource assessment methodology.
The participants were also taken to the common bamboo facility centre. In the second session Rajkumar Bajpai from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS) demonstrated the use of spatial and GIS in working plan code after which Dr Arjit Roy from IIRS made a presentation on generation of stand and stock maps and tables.
