One government meeting.
One signature.
389,000 trees marked for the axe.
That's not a typo. That's what happened on July 6, when the Centre's Forest Advisory Committee sat down and cleared 13 projects spread across 2,004 hectares of forest land.
Coal mines. Iron ore. A CRPF campus. Even a tourism complex.
All in one sitting.
Three coal projects alone ate up 1,737 of the 2,004 hectares cleared.
That's 87% of everything approved.
Here's the breakdown:
For Purunga, the fix? A ₹14.81 crore wildlife management plan.
Whether paper plans save real elephants is the question nobody's answering yet.
Alaknanda sits on scheduled tribe land.
A retired IFS officer compared it directly to the Sijimali bauxite project — where indigenous rights were already violated.
So this isn't only an ecology story.
It's a people story too.
Villages sit inside these forest patches. Communities, not just canopy.
Ten other projects got the same Stage-I nod:
Together: 267 hectares, 32,808 trees.
A rounding error next to the coal numbers.
Stage-I is just the in-principle nod.
Stage-II — the final approval — still needs conditions met.
So the felling hasn't started.
But the direction has been set.
389,000 trees are now on the clock, and India's coal appetite just took priority over the canopy.
That's all for now!
