EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 96 of 120

Correct — C, (c) The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. CAMPA stands for the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority, and both the money it handles and the authority itself belong to forest administration, which at the Union level is the business of this Ministry. The money arises in a specific way. Under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, forest land cannot be used for a non-forest purpose — a mine, a dam, a road, a transmission line, a factory — without the prior approval of the Central Government, and when approval is granted it is granted on conditions. The user agency has to bear the cost of raising compensatory afforestation over an equivalent area of non-forest or degraded forest land, and it has to pay the net present value of the forest being diverted, which is an estimate of the value of the goods and services that stretch of forest would have produced over the years to come. Those payments accumulated into very large sums, and CAMPA is the machinery for holding and spending them. The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 put that machinery on a statutory footing, creating a National Compensatory Afforestation Fund and a Fund for each State, together with a National Authority and State Authorities to manage them, with the great majority of the money — ninety per cent — going to the States, where the diversion and the afforestation actually take place, and the remaining tenth retained at the Centre. The money may be spent on afforestation and assisted natural regeneration, catchment area treatment, wildlife management, forest fire prevention, soil and moisture conservation and similar forestry works. Every element of that description — forest diversion, afforestation, wildlife, catchment treatment — sits within the environment and forests portfolio, which is why the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is the regulating ministry.

• (a)The Ministry of Home Affairs — The Ministry of Home Affairs has no forestry function. Its portfolio is internal security and the police, the central armed police forces, the administration of the Union Territories, centre-state relations, disaster management, the census and the registration of births and deaths, and freedom fighters' pensions. Nothing in the compensatory afforestation scheme touches any of those. The option is presumably in the set because the Ministry is the most generally powerful of the four named and a candidate with no idea might reach for it, and because its disaster management responsibility is loosely associated in the mind with environmental matters. Disaster management and environmental regulation are distinct functions in the Government of India's allocation of business: one is about responding to floods, cyclones and earthquakes, and the other about regulating the use of natural resources and controlling pollution.
• (b)The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare — The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare deals with crops, seeds, fertiliser use, irrigation support, agricultural credit and insurance, marketing and the machinery of price policy. Forests are not agriculture and are not administered by it. The confusion is understandable in the abstract, since both concern land and growing things, and since agroforestry and farm forestry genuinely sit at the boundary between the two; but the compensatory afforestation fund arises from the diversion of forest land under a forest statute and is spent on forestry works, which places it squarely in the environment and forests portfolio. Note also the constitutional background: forests were moved from the State List to the Concurrent List by the forty-second amendment in 1976, which is what allows a central statute such as the Forest (Conservation) Act to control the diversion of forest land at all.
• (d)The Ministry of Defence — The Ministry of Defence appears in this option set for a reason worth understanding, because the answer to it is a genuine insight rather than an elimination. Defence projects — roads in border areas, firing ranges, installations in forested terrain — are among the user agencies that seek the diversion of forest land, and when they do they pay compensatory afforestation costs and net present value into the fund like any other user agency. But paying into a fund is not regulating it. The regulator is the ministry that administers the statute under which the diversion is approved and the money is collected and spent, and that is the environment and forests ministry. Keeping the roles of user agency, regulator and fund manager distinct is exactly what this question is testing, and the same distinction answers many questions about environmental clearance in general.

Forest land in India cannot be turned to a non-forest use at will. The Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 requires the prior approval of the Central Government before a State may dereserve a forest or allow forest land to be used for a non-forest purpose, and that requirement is the hinge on which the whole compensatory afforestation system turns. When approval is given, it carries conditions: the user agency must fund compensatory afforestation over an equivalent area of non-forest land, or over twice the area of degraded forest land where non-forest land is not available, and it must pay the net present value of the diverted forest, a monetary estimate of the ecosystem goods and services the forest would have yielded in future. These payments were for years held in an ad hoc arrangement created under directions of the Supreme Court, and the accumulation of unspent money became a public issue in itself. The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 gave the arrangement a statutory basis: it establishes a National Compensatory Afforestation Fund and a State Fund for each State, credited to the Public Account rather than the Consolidated Fund, and constitutes a National Authority and State Authorities to administer them. Ninety per cent of the money goes to the State concerned and ten per cent is retained centrally, and permissible uses are forestry uses — afforestation and assisted natural regeneration, catchment area treatment, wildlife management and protection, forest fire prevention, soil and moisture conservation and the strengthening of forest infrastructure. The constitutional foundation for central involvement is that forests, along with the protection of wild animals and birds, were transferred from the State List to the Concurrent List by the forty-second amendment in 1976. The recurring criticisms of the scheme are worth knowing as well: money accumulating faster than it is spent, plantations raised on land that is not ecologically equivalent to what was lost, and afforestation carried out on land over which forest dwellers hold or claim rights.

The governance block of this paper regularly asks which ministry or which body administers a named programme, fund or authority, and the questions are answered from the allocation of business rather than from any deep knowledge of the programme. The method that works is to expand the acronym and read it. CAMPA expands to a compensatory afforestation fund management and planning authority, and afforestation is a forestry activity, so the ministry is the one that administers forests. That is the whole of the reasoning, and it is worth practising deliberately, because the acronyms in this area are long and their expansions almost always contain the answer. The option set here is built the way these sets usually are, with one obviously irrelevant ministry, one plausible neighbour whose subject matter is adjacent, and one option that is related to the fund in a different capacity. The last of those is the instructive one: the defence ministry is a user agency that pays into the fund, not the authority that regulates it, and distinguishing the payer from the regulator is a habit that pays across the whole of environmental governance, where a project proponent, a regulator, an appraisal committee and a monitoring authority are four different things. It is also worth remembering that a ministry's name may change while its functions do not; this one has carried environment and forests for decades and added climate change to its title in 2014.

• CAMPA stands for the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority, and both the fund and the authority are administered under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the Union ministry responsible for forests, wildlife, pollution control and environmental clearance.
• The money arises under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, which requires prior central approval before forest land is used for a non-forest purpose. The user agency must fund compensatory afforestation over an equivalent area and pay the net present value of the diverted forest, an estimate of the ecosystem goods and services it would have produced in future.
• The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 established a National Compensatory Afforestation Fund and a Fund for each State, together with a National Authority and State Authorities to manage them. Ninety per cent of the money goes to the State in which the diversion occurred and ten per cent is retained at the Centre.
• The funds are credited to the Public Account rather than to the Consolidated Fund, and the money may be spent on afforestation and assisted natural regeneration, catchment area treatment, wildlife management and protection, forest fire prevention, soil and moisture conservation and related forestry works.
• Forests and the protection of wild animals and birds were moved from the State List to the Concurrent List by the forty-second amendment in 1976, which is the constitutional basis on which a central statute can control the diversion of forest land held by a State.
• A user agency such as a mining company, a power utility or a defence establishment pays into the fund; it does not administer it. Distinguishing the project proponent from the regulator and from the fund manager is the distinction this question is built on.

• Reaching for a large and generally powerful ministry when the subject is unfamiliar. The allocation of business is specific, and afforestation belongs to the environment and forests portfolio and to no other.
• Assuming that anything to do with land and growing things belongs to agriculture. Forests are administered separately from agriculture, and the fund arises under a forest statute and is spent on forestry works.
• Confusing a user agency with the regulator. Defence, mining and infrastructure agencies pay compensatory afforestation costs into the fund; the ministry that administers the statute regulates it.
• Mixing up compensatory afforestation money with budgetary money. The funds are credited to the Public Account and are not an appropriation from the Consolidated Fund voted by Parliament.
• Forgetting the constitutional basis. Central control over the diversion of forest land rests on forests having been moved to the Concurrent List in 1976, without which a central statute could not operate on State forests.

Environmental governance appears in this paper in three shapes. The first is the administrative identification set here: a fund, an authority or a mission is named and the candidate must say which ministry runs it, which is answered by expanding the acronym and reading the subject matter out of it. The second is statutory: which Act provides for a named requirement, what prior approval is needed before forest land is diverted, what the National Green Tribunal may hear, or which schedule of the Wild Life (Protection) Act a species falls in. The third is conceptual, asking what net present value is meant to capture, what compensatory afforestation is, or why a particular criticism is made of a scheme. Preparation that serves all three is a list of the major environmental statutes with their years and their central mechanism, a list of the funds and authorities with the ministry against each, and one clause on the standing criticism of each scheme, since the paper's current-affairs items often approach these subjects through the controversy rather than through the design.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The money that accumulates in the compensatory afforestation fund is paid principally by

  • (a)the user agency to which forest land is diverted for a non-forest purpose
  • (b)the Ministry of Finance out of the Consolidated Fund of India
  • (c)international climate finance institutions under bilateral agreements
  • (d)a cess levied on the sale of timber and other forest produce

  Answer(a) the user agency to which forest land is diverted for a non-forest purpose — when the Central Government approves the use of forest land for a mine, a dam, a road or an installation, the agency taking the land must fund compensatory afforestation over an equivalent area and pay the net present value of the forest being lost. The fund is therefore financed by those who cause the diversion, not by a budgetary appropriation.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016, the National Fund and the State Funds are credited to

  • (a)the Consolidated Fund of India and the Consolidated Funds of the States
  • (b)the Public Account of India and the Public Accounts of the States
  • (c)the Contingency Fund of India and the Contingency Funds of the States
  • (d)separate accounts maintained with scheduled commercial banks by each user agency

  Answer(b) the Public Account of India and the Public Accounts of the States — the money is held by the government in a fiduciary capacity for a specific purpose rather than forming part of its general revenues, which is the defining character of the Public Account. Expenditure from the Consolidated Fund requires appropriation by the legislature, and the Contingency Fund is an imprest for unforeseen expenditure pending authorisation.