May 06, 2024 07:00 AM IST
At least 1,100 hectares of forest land have been damaged in over 900 incidents of forest fire in the hill state in the last six months
Dehradun: With forest fires raging in Uttarakhand, chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Sunday ordered a ban on stubble burning for a week and instructed officials to ensure there was no burning of wastes in and around forests by civic bodies, people familiar with the development said.
Dhami over a phone call instructed chief secretary Radha Raturi to issue directions to all district magistrates to monitor forest fire in their respective regions every day for a week, a senior state official said.
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“Dhami also instructed the district magistrates to completely ban the burning of all types of stubble for one week with immediate effect. Besides, he issued directions for all urban local bodies to ban the burning of their solid waste in forests or around forests,” the official added.
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The directives came a day after Dhami had presided a meeting with top officials of the state government and all district magistrates through video-conferencing from Uttarakhand Sadan in New Delhi. The CM had asked the chief secretary to fix the responsibility of officials for checking the raging fires in the Himalayan state.
“Forest fires have emerged as a big challenge for the state government. The responsibility of officials from top to bottom should be fixed. The officials posted at the headquarters level should be given the responsibility of divisions to tackle the forest fires,” Dhami said on Saturday. “Regular reports should be taken from all of them.”
At least 1,100 hectares of forest land have been damaged in over 900 incidents of forest fire in the hill state in the last six months, officials said.
Nishant Verma, the nodal officer for forest fire incidents in Uttarakhand, said that the state reported 24 incidents of forest fire — 22 in Kumaon region, and one each in Garhwal and wildlife administrative regions — on Sunday, in which 36.4 hectares of forest land were damaged.
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“From November 1 last year till Sunday 4 pm, 910 incidents of forest fires have been reported in the state in which at least 1,144.3 hectares of forest land have been damaged. Of these, 398.46 hectares have been damaged in the Kumaon region, 657.9 hectares in the Garhwal region and 87.9 hectares in the administrative wildlife regions,” Verma said.
So far, 351 cases have been registered in “man-made” forest fire incidents against 59 named and 290 unidentified suspects, he added.
Uttarakhand has recorded the highest number of large forest fires in the country in the last seven days since April 28, according to the data of the Forest Survey of India (FSI). The Himalayan state reported the highest 325 large forest fire incidents in this period, followed by Odisha (196), Chhattisgarh (148), Madhya Pradesh (105) and Jharkhand (79). In the same period, Uttarakhand also recorded 4,543 fire alerts, the highest in the country, followed by Odisha (2,981), Chhattisgarh (2,527), Jharkhand (1,420) and Madhya Pradesh (105), according to FSI data.
