India's Deforestation: patterns and processes

Abstract

Precolonial India was largely a nation of people who relied on their immediate surroundings for a diversity of biological resources and who had evolved a variety of cultural practices of prudent resource use. This system was radically transformed under British rule when cultivated as well as noncultivated lands were dedicated to the production of a small number of resources to be exported out of the locality. All tracts of erstwhile community-controlled lands were taken over as state property; some of these were set apart as reserved forest for commercial timber production; others were permitted to be used by local communities for meeting their biomass needs. The latter were no longer under community control and as no-man's-lands began to suffer over-exploitation. This process of nonsustainable forest use has been intensified after independence with forests increasingly dedicated to highly subsidized supply of raw materials to the forest-based industry.