Bureaucrats for Mass Destruction

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Dr. T. Chatterjee, Secretary Environment and Forests, Government of India and Chairman Board of Governors, Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM) defied imagination when he suggested at the Eighth Convocation of IIFM Bhopal on April 4, 2011 that an area of policy research could be devoted to study the feasibility of using the wood value of forests (that could be grown) in 35 million hectares of degraded forests in the country for high-end products. What's wrong with going back to the old days of wooden furniture so long as it brings revenue to the forest dwellers creating an incentive in them to protect forests and forest dependent wildlife. Even tiger conservation could be incentivised not by relocating human communities away from buffer zones but by paying them "prevention-fee" every month linking such payments to the animal population in the reserve area they border, he added.

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