He Rebuilt Forests By Winning People's Trust | Mudit Kr Singh | Moving Forests | EP- 29

Sir, in one of my previous episodes...

I spoke to senior advocate, Mr. Sanjay Upadhyay.

He is now a Supreme Court advocate.

Senior advocate.

Senior advocate.

And he told me something which was very interesting.

He said that in 1974, after the Stockholm conference, Indira Gandhi came back and she declared that at least 4.5% of the Indian land has to be pristine forest.

Now, this was declared back then.

There were many efforts made.

And then we also found that if you lay down maps of India, like the key maps of India, which is The mineral map of India, the wildlife map of India, the tribal map of India, poverty map of India, they can overlap on top of each other because the places that are rich with minerals are also the places which are wild and are with communities that are the poorest.

So now for any government, the challenge is if I have to work with poor, I cannot take the minerals out.

But if I have to preserve my forest, I cannot... develop the way I want to, because in order for me to develop, I have to take those minerals out.

So during your course, what was your experience of this dilemma? Because I'm sure if you joined in 83, 84, this is 72, 74.

And you must have faced this jeopardy of, you know, this complex issues that we face as a country.

And how did you tackle it?

It's a very interesting and very thought-provoking question, I must say.

And thank you for this insight.

In fact, I'll take you a little back.

If you see from the time we got independence, our population was 35 crore something.

And today we are 150 plus.

Now, this is one side where the population is growing.

And as you know, 70% of India's population is rural-based.

Now, other side is the land has a fixed carrying capacity.

And in each household where there were two or four people, now there are 10 people.

There