As per the India State of Forest Report 2023, which of the following districts in Uttar Pradesh had forest over more than 20% of their total area ?
1. Bahraich
2. Chandauli
3. Shravasti
Select the cor

Question

As per the India State of Forest Report 2023, which of the following districts in Uttar Pradesh had forest over more than 20% of their total area ?
1. Bahraich
2. Chandauli
3. Shravasti
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, 2 and 3 — Chandauli and Shravasti. On the India State of Forest Report 2023 figures, forest cover works out to about 21 per cent of the geographical area in Chandauli and about 21 per cent in Shravasti, both clearing the question's 20 per cent bar, while Bahraich sits at only about 10 per cent and does not. Chandauli is the intuitive half: it lies on the Vindhyan escarpment of south-eastern Uttar Pradesh, next to Sonbhadra and Mirzapur in the state's one genuinely forested belt, and it holds the Chandraprabha Wildlife Sanctuary. Shravasti is the half that surprises people, and it is worth being precise about why. Its forest cover is 284.54 square kilometres. Divide that by the district area that FSI itself uses, roughly 1,358 square kilometres, and you get about 21 per cent; divide the same forest area by the district area of about 1,640 square kilometres that many general sources quote, and you get the 17.35 per cent figure that circulates online. The question says 'As per the India State of Forest Report 2023', so it is FSI's own denominator that governs, and on that basis Shravasti crosses 20 per cent. Read these district percentages as approximate rather than to two decimals — the point being tested is which side of the 20 per cent line each district falls on.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Chandauli belongs, but Bahraich does not — it comes in at only about 10 per cent, half the threshold. Bahraich is the district candidates most often over-rate, because it contains the Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, a well-known part of the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve landscape on the Nepal border. But Katarniaghat's forest is a block inside a very large district whose remaining area is intensively cultivated terai plain, so the sanctuary lifts the district's absolute forest area without lifting its percentage anywhere near 20.  (c) Shravasti does clear the bar, but so does Chandauli, so this option is incomplete. Chandauli sits in the Vindhyan hill country of south-eastern Uttar Pradesh alongside Sonbhadra and Mirzapur — the only part of the state where dry deciduous forest survives on any scale — and it is home to the Chandraprabha Wildlife Sanctuary. Leaving it out means treating the state's second most forested district as though it were plains country.  (d) This picks the single district that fails the test and drops the two that pass. Bahraich's forest cover is only around 10 per cent of its area; the presence of a famous sanctuary within a district is not the same thing as a high share of forest across the whole district.

Concept: The India State of Forest Report is the biennial assessment published by the Forest Survey of India, Dehradun, under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; the 2023 edition was released in December 2024. Its central measure, forest cover, is defined by what the satellite sees rather than by who owns the land: any patch of one hectare or more with a tree canopy density of at least ten per cent counts as forest cover, whatever its legal status, so plantations, orchards and trees outside notified forests are all included. That cover is then graded as very dense forest at seventy per cent canopy and above, moderately dense between forty and seventy, and open forest between ten and forty, with scrub below ten per cent counted separately. Because forest cover is a satellite measure and recorded forest area is a legal-revenue measure, the two produce different numbers for the same district or state — which is exactly the kind of gap that makes questions like this one turn on the denominator rather than the numerator.

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