📌 WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY 2026: WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CELEBRATING?

Today is WorldEnvironmentDay. A day for speeches, hashtags, photo-ops with saplings, solemn pledges and carefully crafted messages about our love for nature.

But forgive me for asking - what exactly are we celebrating?

The environment that we are systematically destroying? The forests we are cutting down for mining? The rivers we are poisoning with industrial waste and sewage? The mountains we are blasting in the name of infrastructure development? The biodiversity we are driving to extinction? Or the tribal communities we are uprooting from lands they have protected for

generations?

Nothing captures the hypocrisy of this annual ritual better than what is happening in the Hasdeo Forests of Chhattisgarh, one of India’s richest forest ecosystems, often called the 'Lungs of Central India'.

I’m not against generating energy or against development, but the question is why the easiest solution always seems to be sacrificing forests, biodiversity and indigenous rights.

Year after year, governments assure us that environmental protection is a priority. Prime Ministers and assorted others speak passionately about climate change, sustainability and green growth. Yet on the ground, forests continue to disappear under excavators and mining clearances.

World Environment Day has increasingly become an exercise in collective self-congratulation and is reduced to mere tokenism that allows governments, corporations and even citizens to feel virtuous for a day while the destruction continues uninterrupted for the remaining 364.

For decades, the scientists, environmentalists, and everyone concerned have been warning that the climate crisis is no longer a future threat. It has already entered our homes: the heatwaves, floods, droughts, crop failures and disappearing water sources are real-life

manifestations.

I am pained to say that while leaders plant ceremonial saplings and deliver speeches on sustainability, an estimated 5 lac trees are proposed to be slaughtered in Hasdeo forests; over 15000 Adivasi families will be impacted, whose lives depend on these forests for their livelihoods, for their very survival. Let that sink in. If this is environmental protection, what does environmental destruction look like?

 📌 Forests taken away from the guardianship of forest dwellers.

In India as in other parts of the developing world, many communities call the forests their home and have lived there over generations. This community of forest dwellers have traditionally derived their livelihoods from the forest which has included forest produce and agriculture.

Colonial policies which used the forest as a timber resource have historically been antagonistic to forest dwellers. Later national policies declaring certain parts of the forest as protected areas, national parks and conservation zones put further pressure on forest dwelling communities forcing displacement and marginalization.

To undo these gross violations of the rights of forest communities, the Government of India enacted the Forest Rights Act in 2006. This law recognized the rights of forest communities to live on and cultivate ancestral forest land. It also gave them legal rights to collect and use Non Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) and also sell these collections. In recognition of their role in conserving the forest, The Forest Rights Act (FRA) granted forest dwellers the right to protect and manage community forest resources. In this way, the FRA made tribal communities the legal custodians of India’s most ecologically significant landscapes. But this did not last long.

In 2023, the government brought an amendment to the largely positive Forest Conservation Act 1980 which militates directly against the earlier rights granted to forest dwellers under the FRA 2006. The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 has removed the mandatory clause that the Gram Sabha had to give its consent before any forest land could be diverted. This was the one institutional mechanism through which forest communities could exercise binding authority over their forests. By the treacherous amendment of 2023 amendment, this right was taken away, opening the forest to rampant exploitation.

https://theindiantribal.com/2026/05/15/weakening-tribal-forest-rights-could-undermine-indias-climate-commitments-and-carbon-sink-targets/