The government is determined to evict forest land grabbers.
However, it needs full support to conduct a successful eviction of land sharks from forest lands.
Deputy minister of environment, forest and climate change, Begum Habibun Nahar said this recently.
She said, “To recover forest lands, the people must be conscious. People from all spheres of life must come forward and raise their voices against the land grabbers, and trace their source of power”.
“It’s a big unethical work which has been continuing over the years. We need unity against the illegal grabbers and only then we can recover our illegally occupied land smoothly”, she added.
The government is considering a crash programme to recover land grabbed by unholy nexus. Presently, around 2.87 lakh acres of forest lands across the country are illegally occupied.
Recently, the parliamentary standing committee on the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change had recommended that the Forest Department take up such a crash programme to evict the grabbers and recover occupied land.
The committee also recommended that the forest department should take necessary steps to digitize all land records.
At the same time, the committee sought the list of people or organizations that have illegally occupied the forest department’s land and publish the details on the website.
According to the government data, it was learnt that about 90,000 individuals and organisations have illegally occupied the forest department land. In Cox's Bazar district alone 59.471 thousand acres of forestland has been illegally grabbed by different individuals and organisations.
Experts said that the country’s forests have declined at an alarming rate over the last 15 years. In order to maintain the balance of the environment, a country should have forests on 25 percent of the total land area. According to the forest department, there is now 13 percent forest land in the country.
Farid Uddin Ahmed, Executive Director of Aranyak Foundation (the Bangladesh Tropical Forest Conservation Foundation) told Bangladesh Post, “It’s high time the government evict unlawful occupiers of forest land. What we have allotted to different ministries and organizations, to date is enough. Under no circumstances, should any new forest land be allotted to anyone”.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), says 10-15 percent of the world's people are still dependent on forest resources. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the government wants to increase the forest area of the country to 20 percent by 2030.
According to the latest report of the Forest Department, the total forest area in the country is more than 63 lakh acres. Of this, about 33 lakh acres are reserved forests. The amount of protected forest is about 12 lakh acres.
