Vijayawada: Action plan to increase forest cover in Krishna chalked out

Vijayawada: District Forest Department has prepared an action plan to increase the forest cover by planting saplings in 1,000 hectares every year for 10 years.

Forest cover in Krishna district is only 7.38 percent of the forest area. It is confined to limited areas like Ibrahimpatnam, Mylavaram, A Konduru, G Konduru, Nuzvid, Agiripalli, Bapulapadu and some other mandals.

Of the total area of 8,72,700 hectares in Krishna district, the forest cover is only 64,451 hectares, which is less than eight percent. The Forest Department has decided to promote artificial regeneration of trees by planting sapling in the forest areas to increase the green cover. As per the national environmental norms, the forest cover should be 33 percent of the total area. Due to various reasons, the forest cover is very low in the district.

Open forest area is spread over 36,688 hectares, scrubs forest area is 13,395 hectares, non-forest area is 4,927 and the remaining is water bodies and others. District Forest Officer K Rajasekhar Rao told The Hans India that the department has prepared an action plan to grow saplings in 1,000 hectares every year under the Aided Natural Regeneration plantation under the Compensatory afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) scheme and other schemes. He said massive plantation drive has been taken up this rainy season to increase vegetation in the district.

The Forest Department has huge responsibility of protecting the existing forest lands from encroachments. With the increase of urbanisation, land grabbers are constantly trying to encroach upon the forest lands. The Forest Department dug trenches along forest land boundaries to check encroachments. The trench has width of three to four metres and depth of two meters. Protection of different species of animals like deer, wild boar, peacock, snakes and other birds in Kondapalli forest is also an important task.