With the Met department predicting a hot and dry summer this year, theUttarakhandgovernment has decided — with the onset of the wildfire season in the state — that the players involved in making chir pine needle products will be given a whopping 70% relaxation inGSTfor five years.
Moreover, the forest department will create a “special corpus” to make payments to all the NGOs involved in the collection of pine needles from forests. Also, the transit fee for the transportation of pine needles would be reduced. The meeting was chaired by chief secretary SS Sandhu and attended by senior forest officials. The clearance of pine needles from the forest floor is important, because an Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS) study during lockdown had established that a staggering 70% of the forest fires are related to anthropogenic activities. Pine needles (leaves of pine trees) are highly combustible and often, a carelessly-tossed beedi or matchstick in a chir pine forest is known to have triggered a major wildfire in the hills. According to forest department, Chir pine forests are spread across around 3.94 lakh hectares of total forest area in the state and the trees shed at least 15 lakh metric tonnes of pine needles annually, leading to highly inflammable conditions in forests, especially during summer.
Incidentally, out of 13 different types of trees classified by the forest department here, chir pine has the highest area — almost 15.25% of the total 25,86,318 hectares.