Source: PIB & Ministry of Environment & Forests
The overall objective of the National Afforestation Programme (NAP) scheme is the ecological restoration of degraded forests and to develop the forest resources with peoples’ participation, with a focus on improvement in livelihoods of the forest-fringe communities, especially the poor.
NAP aims to support and accelerate the on-going process of devolving forest conservation, protection, management, and development functions to the Joint Forest Management Committees (JFMCs) at the village level, which are registered societies.
Components of the scheme
The major components of the scheme include;
- Afforestation under Seven plantation models
- Maintenance of previous years plantations and Ancillary Activities like soil and moisture conservation activities (SMC)
- Fencing, overheads, monitoring, and evaluation (M&E)
- Micro-planning
- Awareness-raising
- Entry Point Activities (EPA) etc.
Sanctioning of the afforestation area
The Scheme is demand-driven and the afforestation area is sanctioned on the basis of past performance, potential degraded forest land available for eco-restoration and availability of budget.
Fund sharing
- NAP is a centrally sponsored scheme which is implemented with the fund sharing pattern of 60: 40 percent between Centre and States wherein the sharing pattern for Northeastern and hilly States is 90:10.
- The central share of funds are released through State Government and state government transfers the funds to SFDA along with its state share which sometimes causes a delay in fund availability to SFDAs for implementation of NAPcausing delay in submission of mandatory documents for subsequent release of funds.
Implementation of the scheme
The scheme is implemented by three-tier institutional set up through the following agencies;
- The State Forest Development Agency (SFDA) at the state level
- Forest Development Agency (FDA) at the forest division level and
- JFMCs at the village level.
