Chief Secretary Alok Ranjan has directed the forest departments to ensure inter-departmental coordination to achieve the maximum plantation for enhancing the forest cover in the state. He asked the forest department to seek cooperation of different departments like Housing, Industrial Development, Horticulture, Rural Development, Urban Development, PWD , Irrigation, Education to make tree plantation programme public oriented and to motivate farmers and general public to plant trees on their land.
He said that Education department should motivate students for plantation by building awareness about its benefits and affection towards trees. He said that target of plantation of 6 crore plants had been fixed including plantation of 5 crore plants by Forest and Wildlife department and 1 crore by other departments by a date fixed in month of July 2016.
Chief Secretary issued these directions to principal secretaries, all divisional commissioners and district magistrates through a circular. He has directed all District Magistrates to coordinate with other departments to achieve the tree plantation targets. He has said that all DMs will have to ensure that periodic review meetings of district tree plantation committees were held. The convener of these committees would be zonal forest officer, zonal director, social forestry and district level officers of executing departments would be the members. He directed for wide publicity of tree-plantation programme.
He said the district tree-plantation Committees should meet to make strategy to ensure availability of plants and other requirements according to the district targets. He has said that saplings could be purchased from private nurseries only when zonal forest officer, zonal director provide certificate to the department concerned that there were no plants in departmental nurseries. He said that nursery-wise and variety-wise details of plants to be planted should be made available to district tree-plantation committees.
The maintenance of planted saplings was more important than mere plantation; hence special attention should be paid to this aspect. He has asked to ensure cent percent verification of Forest department tree plantation by Forest Conservator through inter-departmental squads. He said that 5 % of plantation by departments concerned would be
Verified by the principal secretary or secretary. He said that concerned departments which has been assigned tree plantation targets would provide place-wise plantation information to district level officer, so that inter- departmental checking teams could verify the progress. He said that district level officers of the concerned departments would provide progress information to zonal forest officers, zonal directors, Social Forestry. The DMs have been asked to ensure that tree-plantation progress information is provided to Additional Chief Forest Conservator, Social and Agriculture Forestry by the specified date in July 2016.
