Chapter 6 — Lesson 1 ଅରଣ୍ୟ ସମ୍ବଳ

A forest is a large area of land covered mainly by trees and other woody vegetation, with its own community of plants, animals and micro-organisms and its own soil and climate. In the language of the Forest Survey of India, forest cover is land of more than one hectare with a tree canopy density of more than 10 per cent, whatever its ownership or legal status. Forests are the natural vegetation of most of India, the cover that would grow if people left the land alone, and they are the greatest single biotic resource of the country.

The uses of forests fall under three heads. Productive uses are the goods that forests yield. Timber for building, furniture, railway sleepers, boats and packing comes from sal, teak, sisoo, deodar and many others. Fuelwood remains the main cooking fuel of most rural households in India, and the largest single use of wood. Fodder for cattle, goats and buffaloes is cut or grazed in the forest. Bamboo serves for houses, baskets, furniture, scaffolding and paper. Minor or non-timber forest produce is a vast list: kendu or tendu leaf for bidis, sal seed and leaf, mahua flower and seed, tamarind, amla, harida, bahada, honey, wax, lac, gum, resin, hill broom, sabai grass, siali leaf, chironji, tasar silk cocoons, medicinal plants and wild foods. Industrial raw material for paper, plywood, matches, rayon, tannin and dyes comes from forests. In Odisha several lakh tribal families earn a large part of their cash income from collecting and selling such produce.

Protective uses are the services forests render without being harvested. Trees intercept rain, their litter and roots let it soak into the ground, and the forest releases it slowly to springs and streams, so forested catchments have steadier rivers and fewer floods; the Mahanadi, Brahmani and Baitarani depend on the forests of their upper basins. Roots bind the soil and stop erosion; forests on slopes protect the plains below from silt. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, moderate temperature, raise humidity and encourage rain, and purify the air of dust. They shelter wildlife and hold the greater part of the country's biodiversity. Mangroves and coastal forests break storms. Forests are also the home of tribal communities and a source of recreation, research and tourism.

Cultural uses include the sacred groves, the sacred trees, the festivals and the folklore in which forests figure, and their place in the life and religion of forest dwellers.

Economists estimate that the protective services of a forest are worth many times its timber. This is why forests should be managed as a permanent living resource, harvested within their growth, and never treated as a store of timber to be cleared. The National Forest Policy of 1988 put it plainly: the first aim of forest management is environmental stability, and the yield of produce comes second.

The natural vegetation of a region is the plant cover that grows there without human help and has been left undisturbed for a long time. Its character depends on the physical environment, and India's variety of vegetation follows directly from its variety of climate, soil and relief.

Relief. The nature of land influences the type of vegetation. Fertile level land has generally been cleared for agriculture, so natural vegetation survives mainly on undulating and rough terrain, where grasslands and woodlands develop and shelter wildlife. Altitude changes the climate: on a mountain the vegetation changes with height from tropical forest at the foot through temperate forest to alpine meadow and snow, so that a single range holds the vegetation of several latitudes. In Odisha the forests are on the hills and plateaus because the plain was cleared for paddy.

Soil. Different soils provide the basis for different types of vegetation. Sandy soils of the desert support cactus and thorny bushes; wet, marshy, deltaic soils support mangroves and deltaic vegetation; the hill slopes with some depth of soil have conical trees; deep alluvium supports dense forest where it is not cultivated; laterite supports sal and scrub.

Temperature. The character and extent of vegetation are mainly determined by temperature along with humidity, precipitation and soil. On the slopes of the Himalaya and the hills of the peninsula above a height of 900 to 1,500 metres, the fall in temperature affects the types of vegetation and its growth, changing it from tropical to sub-tropical, temperate and alpine. In the plains the year-round warmth allows growth in every month wherever water is available.

Photoperiod or sunlight. The variation in the duration of sunlight at different places is due to differences in latitude, altitude, season and duration of the day. Because of the longer duration of sunlight, trees grow faster in summer.

Precipitation. In India almost the entire rainfall is brought by the advancing south-west monsoon from June to September and the retreating north-east monsoon. Areas of heavy rainfall have more dense vegetation than areas of less rainfall. Rainfall above 200 centimetres gives evergreen forest; 70 to 200 centimetres gives deciduous forest, which sheds its leaves in the dry season to save water; below 70 centimetres gives thorn forest and scrub; and the length of the dry season decides whether a tree can keep its leaves.

The interplay of these factors produces the map of India's forests. Where it is hot and wet all year, in the Western Ghats, the north-east and the islands, the forest is evergreen. Where the monsoon rain is heavy but followed by a long dry season, across most of the peninsula and the Ganga plain including Odisha, the forest is deciduous. Where rain is scanty, in the north-west and the rain shadow of the Ghats, it is thorny. On the mountains it is montane, and on the tidal coasts it is mangrove. The next sections describe each in turn.

Tropical evergreen forests, also called tropical rain forests, are restricted to heavy rainfall areas of the Western Ghats and the island groups of Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the upper parts of Assam and the north-eastern states, and the coast of Tamil Nadu. They are at their best in areas having more than 200 centimetres of rainfall with a short dry season, and warm, humid conditions throughout the year.

The trees reach great heights, up to 60 metres or above. Since the region is warm and wet throughout the year, it has a luxuriant vegetation of all kinds, trees, shrubs and creepers, giving it a multi-layered structure: a canopy of the tallest trees, a lower layer of smaller trees, a layer of shrubs and a floor of ferns and herbs, bound together by climbers and hung with orchids and mosses. Very little sunlight reaches the ground. There is no definite time for trees to shed their leaves; as one tree or one branch sheds, another grows new foliage, so the forest appears green all the year round, which is why it is called evergreen.

Some of the commercially important trees of this forest are ebony, mahogany, rosewood, rubber and cinchona. Others are the white cedar, hollock, kail and toon. The timber is hard, heavy and valuable, but the forests are difficult to work because so many species are mixed together and because the terrain is steep and wet.

The common animals found in these forests are the elephant, monkey, lemur and deer. The one-horned rhinoceros is found in the jungles of Assam and West Bengal. Besides these animals, plenty of birds, bats, sloths, scorpions and snails are also found in these jungles. The forests are the richest in species of all Indian forests and the Western Ghats and the north-east are world biodiversity hotspots.

Between the evergreen and the deciduous forests lies a transition type, the tropical semi-evergreen forest, found in the less rainy parts of the evergreen belt, in which evergreen and deciduous species mix; Odisha has patches of it in its wettest hills of Gajapati, Kandhamal, Koraput and the upper slopes of Similipal, with species such as jamun, mango, champa and bamboos beside the sal.

Evergreen forests have suffered from clearing for tea, coffee, rubber and spice plantations, for timber and for settlement, and because they regenerate slowly and their soils erode quickly once opened, they are among the most threatened forests in India. Their protection in national parks such as Silent Valley in Kerala and the Namdapha reserve in Arunachal Pradesh is a national priority.

Tropical deciduous forests are the most widespread forests of India and are also called monsoon forests. They spread over the region receiving rainfall between 70 and 200 centimetres. Trees of this forest type shed their leaves for about six to eight weeks in the dry summer to reduce the loss of water, which is what deciduous means; the forest is bare or thinly leaved in April and May and green from the first rains.

On the basis of the availability of water these forests are further divided into moist and dry deciduous.

Moist deciduous forests are found in areas receiving rainfall between 100 and 200 centimetres. They exist mostly in the eastern part of the country, in the north-eastern states, along the foothills of the Himalaya, in Jharkhand, West Odisha and Chhattisgarh, and on the eastern slopes of the Western Ghats. Teak is the most dominant species of this forest in the south and west, and sal in the east including Odisha. Bamboos, shisham, sandalwood, khair, kusum, arjun and mulberry are other commercially important species. The trees are 30 to 40 metres tall, the forest is fairly dense with a shrub layer and grasses, and it is the most valuable timber forest of the country.

Dry deciduous forests are found in areas having rainfall between 70 and 100 centimetres. They are found in the rainier parts of the peninsular plateau and the plains of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. There are open stretches in which teak, sal, peepal and neem grow, with grass between the trees and a scattered, park-like appearance. A large part of this region has been cleared for cultivation and some parts are used for grazing.

In these forests, the common animals found are the lion, tiger, pig, deer and elephant. A huge variety of birds, lizards, snakes and tortoises are also found here. The tiger reserves of central India, Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Pench, and of Odisha, Similipal and Satkosia, are all in deciduous forest.

The deciduous forest is the forest of Odisha. Nearly all the state's forest belongs to this type: moist deciduous with sal in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Kandhamal and the Eastern Ghats, and dry deciduous in the central tableland and the western districts. Sal, the dominant tree, is a tall straight hardwood valued for building and sleepers, whose leaves are stitched into plates and whose seed yields oil. Teak has been planted widely. Kendu, mahua, bamboo, asan, piasal, kusum and harida are the companions of sal, and the forest floor provides the minor produce on which tribal households depend. The deciduous forest is easy to work and easy to clear, and it is the forest most reduced by farming, grazing, fuelwood and fire, which is why so much of it is now open or degraded.

Three further forest types complete the map of India's natural vegetation.

Tropical thorn forests and scrubs. In regions with less than 70 centimetres of rainfall the natural vegetation consists of thorny trees and bushes. This type of vegetation is found in the north-western part of the country, including semi-arid areas of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, and in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats. Acacias, palms, euphorbias and cacti are the main plant species, along with khejri, ber and babool. Trees are scattered and have long roots penetrating deep into the soil in order to get moisture; the stems are succulent to conserve water, and the leaves are mostly thick and small to minimise evaporation. These forests give way to thorn scrub and grass in the drier parts. The common animals are rats, mice, rabbits, fox, wolf, tiger, lion, wild ass, horses and camels. Odisha has no true thorn forest, but the degraded scrub on its laterite uplands resembles it.

Montane forests. In mountainous areas the decrease in temperature with increasing altitude leads to a succession of natural vegetation belts in the same order as from the tropical to the tundra region. The wet temperate forests are found between a height of 1,000 and 2,000 metres; evergreen broad-leaf trees such as oaks and chestnuts predominate. Between 1,500 and 3,000 metres, temperate coniferous forests containing trees like pine, deodar, silver fir, spruce and cedar are found; these cover mostly the southern slopes of the Himalaya and places of high altitude in southern and north-eastern India. At higher elevations, temperate grasslands are common. At altitudes above 3,600 metres, temperate forests and grasslands give way to alpine vegetation: silver fir, junipers, pines and birches are the common trees, which get progressively stunted as they approach the snow line, and finally give way to shrubs, scrubs and alpine grasslands used by the Gujjar and Bakarwal for summer grazing. At still higher altitudes, mosses and lichens form the tundra vegetation. The common animals are the Kashmir stag, spotted deer, wild sheep, jack rabbit, Tibetan antelope, yak, snow leopard, squirrels, shaggy-horned wild ibex, bear, rare red panda, and sheep and goats with thick hair. Odisha's hills are not high enough for true montane forest, though the tops of Similipal, Deomali and the Mahendragiri carry cooler forest and grassland.

Mangrove forests. The mangrove tidal forests are found in the areas of coasts influenced by tides. Mud and silt get accumulated on such coasts, and dense mangroves are the common varieties with roots of the plants submerged under water. The deltas of the Ganga, Mahanadi, Krishna, Godavari and Kaveri are covered by such vegetation. In the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta the sundari trees provide durable hard timber and give the Sundarbans their name; palm, coconut, keora, agar and other trees also grow. The mangroves have breathing roots that stand above the mud, stilt roots that hold them in shifting silt, seeds that germinate on the parent tree, and leaves that shed salt. They shelter fish, prawns, crabs, crocodiles and birds and break the force of cyclones. The Royal Bengal tiger is the famous animal of the Sundarbans; turtles, crocodiles, gharials and snakes are also found. Odisha's Bhitarkanika, at the mouths of the Brahmani and Baitarani, is the second largest mangrove forest of India with about 60 mangrove species, the richest diversity in the country, and smaller mangroves fringe the Mahanadi mouth, the Devi mouth and the Subarnarekha estuary.

To manage forests one must measure them, and two different measures are in use that a student must not confuse.

Recorded forest area is the land classed as forest in government records, whether it has trees or not. It is about 7.7 lakh square kilometres, roughly 23 per cent of India's geographical area. Part of it is bare, degraded or under other use, while some land outside it, such as orchards, plantations and village woodland, has trees.

Forest cover is the actual area under tree canopy of more than 10 per cent density, measured by the Forest Survey of India from satellite images every two years in the India State of Forest Report. The 2021 report gave the forest cover as about 7.14 lakh square kilometres, about 21.7 per cent of the country, and the tree cover outside forests as a further 2.9 per cent, giving a total forest and tree cover of about 24.6 per cent. The cover has grown slowly in each recent assessment, though much of the growth is in plantations and open forest rather than in dense natural forest.

Forest cover is divided by canopy density into three classes: very dense forest with canopy density of 70 per cent and above, about 3 per cent of the country; moderately dense forest with density from 40 to 70 per cent, about 9.3 per cent; and open forest with density from 10 to 40 per cent, about 9.3 per cent. Land with canopy below 10 per cent is scrub, not forest. Only the dense classes are healthy forest; a large part of the open forest is degraded.

Both figures fall far short of the national goal of 33 per cent of the geographical area under forest or tree cover, set by the National Forest Policy of 1952 and reaffirmed in 1988 as the minimum needed for ecological balance, with a higher target of two-thirds in the hills. India would have to add well over a lakh of square kilometres of forest to reach it.

The distribution is very uneven. In absolute area Madhya Pradesh has the largest forest cover, followed by Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Maharashtra. As a proportion of their area the small north-eastern states and the islands lead: Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have more than 75 per cent under forest. The Union Territories and the agricultural states of Haryana and Punjab have under 4 per cent; Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are also low. Odisha, with about 33.5 per cent, is among the better placed of the large states.

Per head, India has one of the smallest forest areas in the world, about 0.06 hectare per person against a world average of about 0.6, because of its huge population. This is the reason for the intense pressure on Indian forests and for the emphasis on protecting what remains and planting on every available space.

Besides the classification by type and by density, forests in India are classified by the way they are owned and administered, which decides who may use them and how. Most forest land is owned by the government, and the Indian Forest Act of 1927, followed by the state forest acts, divides it into three classes.

Reserved forests. More than half of the total forest land, about 54 per cent, has been declared reserved forests. These are regarded as the most valuable as far as the conservation of forest and wildlife resources is concerned. They are permanently earmarked for forest and are fully protected: no right of grazing, felling, collection, hunting or entry exists except what the government specifically grants, and all activities are prohibited unless permitted. Madhya Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Maharashtra have large percentages of reserved forests of their total forest area.

Protected forests. Almost one-third, about 29 per cent, of the total forest area is protected forest as declared by the Forest Department. These forests are protected from any further depletion, but the local people are allowed certain rights and activities such as grazing, collection of fuelwood and minor produce, unless they are specifically prohibited; in a protected forest all activities are permitted unless prohibited. Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha and Rajasthan have a bulk of their forest under protected forests.

Unclassed forests. The remaining, about 16 per cent, are other forests and wastelands belonging to both government and private individuals and communities that have not been classed as reserved or protected. All the north-eastern states and parts of Gujarat have a very high percentage of their forests as unclassed forests managed by local communities, under the customary and constitutional rights of the tribal communities of the north-east.

Reserved and protected forests are also referred to as permanent forest estates, maintained for the purpose of producing timber and other forest produce and for protective reasons. The Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 requires the approval of the Union government before any of this land is used for a non-forest purpose.

In Odisha the recorded forest of about 58,136 square kilometres is divided into reserved forest of about 26,300 square kilometres, protected forest of about 15,500, of which a part is demarcated and a part undemarcated, and other forests of about 16,300 square kilometres including unclassed forest and forest under the control of the revenue department and communities. Village forests, a category under the state's own law, are forests assigned to village communities, and the Forest Rights Act of 2006 has added community forest resource rights over large areas.

The administrative class matters in practice. The tribal population's customary access is to protected and village forests, and much of the conflict over forests concerns the shifting of land between classes, the recognition of rights within reserved forests, and the diversion of forest land to mines and dams under the 1980 Act.

Odisha is one of the most forested of the large states of India, and its forests are the base of its rural economy, its rivers and its wildlife.

Extent. The recorded forest area is about 58,136 square kilometres, about 37.3 per cent of the state's 1,55,707 square kilometres, far above the national 23 per cent. The forest cover measured by the Forest Survey of India in 2021 was about 52,156 square kilometres, about 33.5 per cent, made up of very dense forest about 7,200, moderately dense about 21,300 and open forest about 23,600 square kilometres, with a further 2 per cent under tree cover outside forests. Odisha ranks fourth in India in forest cover by area after Madhya Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and its cover has increased slightly in recent assessments. Mangrove cover is about 260 square kilometres, the third largest after West Bengal and Gujarat.

Distribution. The forests lie on the hills and plateaus, not on the plain. The districts with the highest forest cover are in the south and north: Kandhamal with about 70 per cent of its area, followed by Gajapati, Nabarangpur, Malkangiri, Rayagada, Koraput, Kalahandi and Boudh in the Eastern Ghats belt, and Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh and Deogarh in the northern plateau, all above 40 per cent. Angul, Dhenkanal, Nayagarh and Sambalpur in the centre are also well forested. The coastal districts of Puri, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara, Bhadrak, Balasore and Cuttack have little forest, apart from the mangroves and coastal plantations.

Types. Almost all the forest is tropical deciduous. Tropical moist deciduous forest with sal dominant covers the northern plateau of Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh, the Kandhamal-Gajapati hills and the higher Eastern Ghats, in the tracts with 125 to 150 centimetres of rain. Tropical dry deciduous forest, more open, with sal, teak, asan, dhaura and bamboo over grass, covers the central tableland and the western districts of Balangir, Bargarh, Sambalpur, Nuapada and Kalahandi and the Mahanadi gorge, with 100 to 125 centimetres of rain. Tropical semi-evergreen forest occurs in small wet patches in Gajapati, Kandhamal, Koraput and the upper Similipal. Mangrove forest occupies Bhitarkanika and the estuaries. Scrub, savanna and degraded forest cover the lateritic uplands of the coastal fringe and the fringes of settlement, and the state has planted casuarina, cashew, teak and eucalyptus widely.

Species. Sal is the tree of Odisha, forming pure and mixed stands over most of the forest. With it grow asan, piasal, kusum, kendu, mahua, sisoo, teak, gambhar, karanja, kurum, dhaura, harida, bahada, amla, jamun, mango, and many bamboos; the forests hold several hundred medicinal plants, orchids of the Eastern Ghats and the Similipal hills, and the tasar host trees asan and arjun.

The forests of Odisha are thus a single great deciduous belt across the highlands, sal-dominated, with a mangrove fringe on the coast. They shelter the state's tribal population and its elephants and tigers, feed its rivers, and yield the produce described in the next section.

The forests of Odisha are a working resource on which lakhs of people depend, and their produce is of two kinds.

Major forest produce is timber and firewood. Sal, teak, asan, piasal, sisoo, gambhar and kurum supply building timber, furniture, railway sleepers and poles; bamboo goes to paper mills and to a hundred rural uses. The Odisha Forest Development Corporation manages commercial felling and plantations, and timber and bamboo are sold through government depots. Fuelwood, the largest use by volume, is collected by rural households under their rights in protected and village forests. The paper mills at Rayagada, Choudwar and Brajarajnagar, the plywood and match units and the furniture trade are the industrial users.

Minor or non-timber forest produce is the more important for the people. Kendu leaf, used to wrap bidis, is the largest; Odisha is among the top producers in India, the leaf is nationalised, that is, collected and sold by the state through primary societies, and its collection in April and May employs several lakh pluckers, mostly tribal women, whose share of the sale price is returned as bonus. Sal seed is collected for oil and its leaves for stitched plates and cups. Mahua flowers are food and the base of a traditional drink, and mahua seed yields oil. Tamarind, amla, harida, bahada, chironji, honey, lac, hill broom, siali leaf, sabai grass for rope and paper, bamboo shoots, wild mushrooms, tubers and greens, resins and gums, and medicinal plants are gathered through the year. Tasar silk is reared on asan and arjun trees in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 gives forest dwellers ownership of minor forest produce, and the state's tribal development cooperative and self-help groups market it, though middlemen still take much of the value.

People. About a fifth of Odisha's population is tribal, and most of it lives in and around the forests of the highlands. For these communities the forest supplies food in the lean season, fuel, fodder, house materials, medicine, the cash income of kendu and sal collection, and the setting of religion and social life. Studies find that forest produce contributes a large share of household income in the forested districts. Women do most of the collection.

Value. The forest sector contributes a small share of the state's recorded income, but the unrecorded value of subsistence use and the ecological services of the forests, water to Hirakud and the delta, soil to the uplands, carbon storage, coastal protection and wildlife, is many times greater.

The forest economy also creates the conflict of this lesson. Timber and bamboo are worth most when cut; minor produce and ecological services are worth most when the forest stands; and mines, dams and industries are worth most when the forest is cleared. How Odisha balances these claims decides the future of its forests.

Deforestation is the clearing or thinning of forest by human action faster than it regenerates. India lost a very large part of its forest in the last two centuries, and although the total cover has stabilised, natural forest continues to be cleared and degraded.

Causes. The greatest damage was done in the colonial period, when railways needed sleepers, the shipbuilding industry needed teak, plantations of tea, coffee and rubber cleared hills, and the forest departments cut for revenue. After independence the causes have been: expansion of agriculture, which converted over 26,000 square kilometres between 1951 and 1980 and continues through encroachment; shifting cultivation, which in Odisha's hills is called podu and, with shortened cycles, has degraded large areas of Koraput, Rayagada, Kandhamal, Gajapati and Malkangiri; river valley projects, which cleared over 5,000 square kilometres nationally and in Odisha submerged forest under Hirakud, Rengali, Upper Kolab, Upper Indravati and Balimela; mining, which has stripped forest in the iron ore belt of Keonjhar and Sundargarh, the Sukinda chromite valley, the Talcher and Ib coal fields and the bauxite plateaus of Koraput, and whose roads and dumps degrade far beyond the pits; industries and urban growth, which take forest for plants, townships and highways; over-grazing, which stops regeneration; excessive fuelwood and timber cutting, legal and illegal, including smuggling of sal and teak; and forest fires, most set by people for grazing, for mahua and kendu collection or by carelessness, which in Similipal in 2021 burnt a large part of the reserve.

Consequences. Deforestation removes the protective cover of the land. Soil erosion strips the uplands and silts rivers and reservoirs, as in Hirakud and Rengali. Floods worsen because the catchment no longer absorbs rain, and droughts worsen because springs and groundwater are no longer recharged; the western districts of Odisha suffer both. Rainfall and local climate change, temperatures rise and humidity falls. Wildlife loses its habitat and corridors, and elephants and tigers are driven into villages, where the conflict kills both animals and people. Biodiversity, including medicinal plants and crop relatives, is lost. Carbon stored in the forest is released, adding to global warming. Forest-dependent people lose food, fuel, income and home, and are displaced or impoverished; women walk farther for fuel and water. Coasts without mangroves suffer the full force of cyclones. The economic losses from these consequences far exceed the gains from the clearing.

The two lessons on forests and wildlife in this unit both rest on this section. The causes of deforestation are the causes of wildlife loss, and the measures of conservation, which follow, address both.

Forest conservation in India rests on a set of policies, laws and programmes that a Class 10 student should know with their dates.

The National Forest Policy. The first policy of independent India in 1952 set the goal of one-third of the land under forest, two-thirds in the hills, and treated forests as a national asset for industry and revenue. The revised policy of 1988 changed the emphasis: the principal aim of forest management is now environmental stability and ecological balance, the needs of tribal and rural people for fuel, fodder and minor produce come before industry, industries must raise their own raw material, people are to be involved through joint forest management, and the 33 per cent goal is reaffirmed. This policy remains the guide.

The Indian Forest Act of 1927 gives the framework of reserved, protected and village forests and forest offences. The Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 is the most important protective law: no forest land may be diverted to any non-forest purpose, and no reserved forest de-reserved, without the prior approval of the Union government, and diversion must be compensated by afforestation of an equal area; the Act has slowed the loss of forest to farms, dams, mines and industries and is the law under which Odisha's mining proposals are examined. The Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 protects forest wildlife and creates parks and sanctuaries. The Environment (Protection) Act of 1986 gives powers against pollution and for environmental impact assessment. The Biological Diversity Act of 2002 protects the diversity of forests. The Forest Rights Act of 2006, properly the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, recognises the individual and community rights of forest dwellers to land, produce and the management of community forest resources and requires the consent of the gram sabha for diversion of forest land; Odisha has issued more titles under it than almost any state.

Institutions. The Forest Survey of India measures the forest every two years; the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education and the state forest research wings do research; the state forest departments manage the forests through divisions and ranges under working plans that fix how much may be felled and where; the Odisha Forest Development Corporation runs plantations and timber sales; and the National Afforestation Programme, the Green India Mission and the compensatory afforestation fund finance planting.

Compensatory afforestation. When forest is diverted under the 1980 Act, the user must pay for the planting of an equal area, or twice the area of degraded forest, and the net present value of the forest lost. Odisha has one of the largest compensatory afforestation funds because of its mining; spending it well on real forest rather than on plantations of exotic species is a current challenge.

Law alone has never saved a forest; the sections that follow describe the planting and the people that give the law its effect.

Because India has too little forest and too many people, conservation means not only protecting what exists but planting more, and the programmes for this have their own vocabulary.

Afforestation is the planting of trees on land that had no forest, and reforestation the replanting of land from which forest was removed. Both are done on degraded forest land, wastelands, catchments, mined land and river banks. The choice of species matters: native species such as sal, teak, bamboo, mango, jamun and neem rebuild an ecosystem, while fast-growing exotics such as eucalyptus and acacia give quick wood but poor habitat and, in dry areas, lower the water table.

Social forestry is the raising of trees on public and common lands to meet the needs of rural people for fuel, fodder, small timber and fruit, so that the pressure on natural forests is reduced. Launched in India in the 1970s, it has three parts. Farm forestry encourages farmers to grow trees on their own land, on bunds, in corners and as woodlots, with free or cheap seedlings. Community forestry plants trees on village commons, tank bunds, school grounds and grazing land for the benefit of the whole village. Extension or strip forestry plants along roads, canals, railways and river banks. Odisha's social forestry project of the 1980s planted very large areas, and the casuarina belts of the coast, the roadside avenues and many village woodlots date from it.

Agro-forestry combines trees with crops or livestock on the same land: fruit and timber trees along field edges, trees over crops in the fashion of the traditional homestead garden of coastal Odisha with coconut, areca, mango, jackfruit and vegetables together, or fodder trees over pasture. It gives the farmer income and protects the soil while adding to the tree cover outside forests, which now counts for nearly 3 per cent of India's area.

Plantation forestry raises commercial species, teak, eucalyptus, acacia, cashew and rubber, in blocks for timber, pulp and nuts. Odisha's cashew plantations on the coastal laterite and teak plantations in the interior are examples.

Recovery of degraded forest. The most economical planting of all is none: closing a degraded forest to grazing, fire and cutting and letting the sal coppice regrow, as the community protection groups of Odisha showed, restores forest in a decade at almost no cost.

Supporting measures. Cooking gas connections, improved stoves and biogas reduce fuelwood cutting; fodder plantations and stall feeding reduce grazing; fire lines, fire watchers and community fire control protect the dry season; controlled felling under working plans keeps the cut below the growth; and the substitution of wood by other materials in construction and packing lowers demand.

Planting programmes have often failed because trees were planted and never protected, or because the wrong species were chosen, or because the villagers who would have guarded them had no stake. The programmes that succeed are those where the people who plant also own the result, which is the lesson of the next section.

The most important development in Indian forest conservation in the last fifty years is the return of forests to the care of the people who live beside them, and Odisha led it.

The community movement. From the 1970s, in villages of Nayagarh, Dhenkanal, Sambalpur, Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and elsewhere, villagers who had watched their forests vanish began to protect the remaining patches themselves. They set rules: no cutting except by permission, no grazing in the regenerating area, a fine for offenders, and thengapali, the guard duty by rotation in which a stick, the thenga, is passed from house to house each evening to mark whose turn it is to patrol. The Binjhagiri hill of Kesharpur in Nayagarh, bare in the 1960s, regrew to dense forest under the Brikshya O Jeevar Bandhu Parishad, the Friends of Trees and Living Beings, and its example spread. By the 1990s several thousand villages were protecting forests without any official programme, and federations such as the Odisha Jungle Manch spoke for them. This self-initiated protection is unique in India in its scale.

Joint Forest Management (JFM). The forest department recognised this movement. Odisha issued the first JFM resolution in India in 1988, and the Union government's circular of 1990, following the 1988 policy, asked all states to adopt it. Under JFM a village forms a Vana Samrakshyana Samiti, a forest protection committee, which shares with the department the responsibility of protecting a defined area of degraded forest; in return the village receives the minor produce, fuel and fodder, and a share, in Odisha half, of the timber and bamboo when the forest is harvested, together with support for micro-plans and livelihoods. More than twelve thousand committees in Odisha now protect several thousand square kilometres, and the recovery of open forest into moderately dense forest in the state's recent surveys is in part their work.

Forest rights. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 went further, recognising the right of forest-dwelling communities to community forest resources, that is, to manage and use the forest within the traditional boundary of the village, subject to conservation. Odisha has recognised such rights in many villages, and the gram sabha's consent is now required before forest land is diverted, as the Niyamgiri decision established.

Sacred groves and tradition. The tribal communities of Odisha have always kept sacred groves and protected trees such as the mahua, sal, tamarind and mango; the community protection movement grew from this tradition as much as from necessity.

Lessons. The Odisha experience has shown three things. Forests protected by the people who use them regenerate faster and at lower cost than forests fenced by the state. Protection lasts only where the community receives a real share of the benefit and has authority over the rules. And conflicts between neighbouring villages, between protection and grazing, and between the community's rights and the department's control must be settled through federations and law rather than force. These lessons have shaped national policy, and they are the reason the forests of Odisha are still standing, and in places growing, when so many others have gone.

The examination tests this lesson through map work, definitions, tables and reasoning, and this final section shows what to prepare.

Map of India. Be able to shade and name the five forest types: tropical evergreen along the Western Ghats, the north-east and the islands; tropical moist deciduous along the Himalayan foothills, the north-east, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and the eastern slopes of the Western Ghats; tropical dry deciduous across the peninsular interior and the Ganga plain; thorn forest in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana and the Deccan rain shadow; montane forest along the Himalaya; and mangroves in the deltas of the Ganga, Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri. Also locate the states with the highest forest cover by area, Madhya Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, and by proportion, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland.

Map of Odisha. Mark the forested highlands of the north, Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh, and the south-west, Kandhamal, Gajapati, Rayagada, Koraput, Kalahandi, Nabarangpur and Malkangiri; the Similipal biosphere reserve; the Satkosia gorge; the Bhitarkanika mangroves; and the coastal plain with little forest.

Definitions and distinctions. Forest cover versus recorded forest area; evergreen versus deciduous; moist versus dry deciduous; reserved versus protected versus unclassed forests; very dense, moderately dense and open forest; afforestation versus reforestation; social forestry and its three parts; agro-forestry; joint forest management; thengapali. Write each as a one-sentence definition followed by an example.

Figures. India: forest cover about 21.7 per cent, total with tree cover about 24.6 per cent, goal 33 per cent; reserved 54, protected 29, unclassed 16 per cent. Odisha: recorded forest about 37 per cent, forest cover about 33.5 per cent, about 52,000 square kilometres, fourth in India by area, mangroves about 260 square kilometres, Kandhamal the most forested district. Learn them as approximations and quote the source year.

Reasoning questions. Why are forests important: answer under productive, protective and cultural heads. Why is India's forest cover below the target: history, population, agriculture, dams, mining. Why does Odisha have more forest than the national average: hilly terrain, tribal population, low density of settlement in the highlands, community protection. What are the causes and consequences of deforestation: give the lists with an Odisha example each. What is the role of local communities: describe thengapali, Kesharpur, JFM 1988 and forest rights. Distinguish the policies of 1952 and 1988: revenue versus ecology.

Short notes. Mangroves; sal; kendu leaf; Similipal; Forest (Conservation) Act 1980; social forestry; Chipko; JFM; compensatory afforestation.

A good answer on forests always moves from definition to distribution to use to threat to conservation, and always includes an example from Odisha. Prepare a single page of figures, dates and names and revise it before the examination; this lesson rewards precision.