Environmental Policy Before Independence

In one line

Colonial environmental policy was forest policy, its object was revenue and its instrument was the assertion of State ownership, and the policy of 1894 said so in terms.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: before independence there was no environmental policy in the modern sense, and what existed was forest policy. The Indian Forest Policy of 1894, the first of its kind, declared that the sole object of State forest administration is the public benefit, subordinated forest conservancy to agriculture, and classified forests by the purpose they served. Its instrument was the Indian Forest Act 1927 and its predecessors of 1865 and 1878, which converted forests into State property and extinguished unclaimed customary rights at settlement.

Why there was no environmental policy

Because the concept did not exist. Three consequences.

Policy was sectoral. There was forest policy, and there was irrigation policy, and there was public health regulation in the presidency towns. There was nothing that treated them as aspects of one subject.

The object was production. The colonial state was interested in the yield of a resource, not in the condition of an environment. Where conservation happened it was because a depleted resource yields less.

There was no domestic constituency. Environmental policy in the modern sense is a response to public demand transmitted through a legislature, and neither existed.

The forest policy of 1894

What it was. A resolution of the Government of India, the first statement of a forest policy for the whole country, issued after three decades of forest administration under the Acts of 1865 and 1878.

Its four propositions, and a candidate should be able to give them.

1. The sole object of State forest administration is the public benefit, which sounds progressive and was understood as the benefit of the State and of agriculture rather than of the forest or of forest dwellers.
2. Agriculture prevails over forestry. Where cultivation could be extended into forest land, it should be, because the state's revenue came principally from land. Forest conservancy was expressly subordinated to it.
3. Forests were classified by purpose: those preserved for climatic or physical reasons, those yielding valuable timber, minor forests, and pasture lands.
4. Rights and privileges of the population were to be regulated, and where they conflicted with the object of management they were to be limited or bought out.

Its significance for a modern answer. The 1894 policy is the document that establishes that colonial forest policy was revenue and agriculture policy, not conservation, on the face of its own text. That is a much stronger way to make the point than asserting it.

The instrument

The policy operated through the forest statutes, treated at length in the chapter on the colonial century. In summary: the Act of 1865 asserted State property in forests; the Act of 1878 introduced the classification into reserved, protected and village forests and the machinery of settlement; and the Indian Forest Act 1927 consolidated both and remains in force.