The State Government is building up a strong case to ask the Union Government for levying “Green Dividends”, an incentive for maintaining the green cover.
Odisha along with some other less-developed States is maintaining the forest cover higher than the all-India average of 21 per cent. As these States are protecting and maintaining the forest resources and thereby helping the country, there is a strong case for receiving incentives in this regard. The Green Dividends could be paid on a regular basis in order to incentivise the States maintaining their forest cover, said Additional Chief Secretary, Finance Upendra Nath Behera at a recently-held meeting here.
The Forest Conservation (FC) Act requires that the forestland cannot be diverted for non-forest use. If any forestland is put to non-forest use, equal quantity of non-forest land will have to be reserved as forestland and compensatory afforestation taken up. But the States which have protected and maintained their forests over the ages cannot put the land of that an extent to any other economic use and, ironically, these States are less-developed.
Behera pointed out that as per the latest Report of the Forest Survey of India, Odisha has a green cover of 31 per cent of its gross geographical area and this is substantially higher than all-India figure of 21 per cent. So far as the green cover is concerned, Mizoram has 91 per cent, Arunachal Pradesh 81 per cent, Nagaland 80 per cent, Meghalaya and Manipur 77 per cent each, Sikkim has 47 per cent, Uttarakhand 46 per cent and Chhattisgarh 41 per cent.
Similar on the lines of Carbon Tax, which the Union Government has levied on the extraction and import of coal, a Green Tax needs to be levied by the State Governments on all minerals extracted from the State, suggested Behera. He said the country is soon going to have a Goods & Services Tax (GST) and in a GST regime and the taxes would be destination-based. The States that are the final consumers of a product or service would get the total benefits of the GST.
So, the States with mining and manufacturing activities would not get the benefit of the tax, whereas they would face the brunt of an adverse environmental impact of these activities. Therefore, environmental corrective measures need to be undertaken which would be a costly affair. The States have to be empowered to levy Green Tax on all the minerals extracted in the line of the Carbon Tax, said Behera.