What Indian Forests Have Served

In one line

The forest law of India was written to get timber out, and everything since has been an attempt to make it do something else.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Indian forest law begins with the Indian Forest Act, 1865, replaced by the Act of 1878 and consolidated in the Indian Forest Act, 1927, whose purpose was to secure the State's control over timber and forest produce and the revenue from them; the National Forest Policy, 1894, treated forests as a source of revenue subordinate to agriculture; the policy of 1952 added the idea of national needs and a target of one-third of the land area under forest; and the National Forest Policy, 1988, reversed the priority, declaring that the principal aim is environmental stability and the maintenance of ecological balance, that the derivation of direct economic benefit must be subordinated to that aim, and that the domestic requirements of the people living in and near forests come first.

What the forest served, period by period

Before the colonial forest law, a forest was used by the people who lived in and around it, under customary arrangements that varied from place to place: grazing, fuel, fodder, minor produce, shifting cultivation, and timber for houses and implements. The State's interest was in the revenue of settled agriculture, not in the trees.

From the 1860s the forest served the State. The railways needed sleepers, the navy needed timber, and the Forest Department was created to supply them. The Act of 1865 and then of 1878 allowed the State to declare a forest reserved, to extinguish or settle the rights people had in it, and to control the transit of forest produce. The 1878 Act's three classes, reserved, protected and village forests, are the classes the 1927 Act still uses.

The National Forest Policy of 1894 stated the position frankly: forests were to be administered for the public benefit, but the claims of cultivation were stronger than the claims of forestry, and forests were a source of revenue.

After independence the forest served the nation's industry. The policy of 1952 declared that village communities should not be permitted to use forests at the cost of national interests, set the target of one-third of the land area under forest, being sixty per cent in the hills and twenty per cent in the plains, and forests supplied the paper, plywood, matchwood and railway industries at concessional rates.

From the 1970s the forest was seen as an ecosystem. Forests and the protection of wild animals and birds moved from the State List to the Concurrent List by the Forty-second Amendment, 1976; the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, required the Central Government's prior approval for any diversion; and the National Forest Policy, 1988, made environmental stability the principal aim.