The government sees a big role for the corporate sector in the recently-launched Green India Mission, according to Director-General of Forests P.J. Dilip Kumar.
”They are sitting on hundreds of thousands of hectares of land that is very well protected,” he said, speaking at a celebration of Environment Day here on Saturday. “So, we have kept a big role for them.”
The department would increase the use of information and communication technology to monitor its efforts in real time. “We need to dispel the impression that once we plant a tree, we forget about it,” he said.
Coimbatore-based Isha Foundation was honoured on the occasion for tree-planting in record numbers. In 2004, it started ‘Project Green Hands' to carry out mass tree plantation in Tamil Nadu, earning a Guinness record by planting more than 8.5 lakh trees on a single day in October 2006.
Its founder Sadhguru J. Vasudev was presented with the Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar by the former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. The country must aim to increase the forest cover to 30 per cent by 2015, said Mr. Kalam. “A billion trees for a billion Indians,” he added.
