MoEFCC grants in-principle clearance to divert Hasdeo-Arand forest for coal mining

📌 Summary:

• The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), accepting its Forest Advisory Committee's recommendation, granted in-principle forest clearance to divert 1,742.6 hectares of Hasdeo-Arand forest for the Kente Extension coal block
• The block is allotted to the Rajasthan government and to be mined by the Adani Group
• The clearance overrides a 2021 biodiversity assessment by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and ICFRE, which said no mining should occur in the Hasdeo-Arand Coal Fields except the already-operational Parsa East Kente Basan mine
• That assessment flagged the landscape's significance for elephants, warning further threats to intact habitats could shift human-wildlife conflict into new areas of Chhattisgarh
• Scale of impact: felling of 4.48 lakh trees (97,837 in the first five years); 67,414 trees under 60 cm girth to be translocated
• Compensatory afforestation approved over 130.6 hectares of non-forest land and 4,450.3 hectares of degraded forest land
• The Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan had raised environmental and tribal-rights concerns

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS3 (Environment) — forest clearance process, EIA, the tension between energy/coal demand and biodiversity/forest rights, compensatory afforestation, and human-elephant conflict.

📝 Prelims Facts:

• Hasdeo-Arand is a contiguous forest in Chhattisgarh, often called the 'lungs of Chhattisgarh'
• Forest diversion clearances are governed by the Forest (Conservation) Act and granted by MoEFCC on the Forest Advisory Committee's advice
• WII and ICFRE conducted the 2021 biodiversity assessment

🔑 Key Term: In-principle (Stage-I) forest clearance — the first-stage approval under forest diversion rules, subject to compliance conditions before final (Stage-II) clearance.