Arrival of the British
British arrived in India at 1600 with the mission of trading goods from India in the form of East India Company. But, after seeing the immense amount of natural resources and plunders of opportunity to exploit the resources present here, they changed their game plan and started applying coercion so as to complete their aim of exploiting natural resources in India. At the time when British arrived in India, India was divided into several princely states ruled by different rulers. It was quite an easy task for the British to establish itself gradually and astutely. They very cleverly implemented the policy of Divide and Rule in India and took benefit of the diversity as on the basis of different rulers as well as due to multiplicity of religion in the country.
The early days of British rule in India were days of plunder of natural resources. They started exploiting the rich resources present India by employing the policy of imperialism . By around 1860, Britain had emerged as the world leader in deforestation, devastation its own woods and the forests in Ireland, South Africa and northeastern United States to draw timber for shipbuilding, iron-smelting and farming. Upon occasion, the destruction of forests was used by the British to symbolize political victory.
Thus, the early nineteenth century, and following its defeat of the Marathas, the East India Company razed to the ground teak plantation in Ratnagiri nurtured and grown by the legendary Maratha Admiral Kanhoji Angre. There was a total indifference to the needs of the forest conservancy. They caused a fierce onslaught on Indian Forests. The onslaught on the forests was primarily because of the increasing demand for military purposes, for British navy, for local construction (such as roads and railways), supply of teak and sandalwood for export trade an extension of agriculture in order to supplement revenue.
The British government started control over forest in the year 1806 when a commission was appointed to enquire into the availability of teak in Malabar and Travancore by way of appointment of Conservator of Forest. This moved failed to conserve forest as the appointed conservator plundered the forest wealth instead of conserving it. Consequently, the post of conservator of forest was abolished in the year 1823.
Their early treatment of the Indian forest also reinforces the claim that destructive energy of the British race all over the world was rapidly converting forest into desert. Until the later decades of nineteenth century, the British Raj carried out a immense onslaught on the subcontinent's forest. With the Oaks forest vanishing in England, a permanent supply of durable timber was required for the British Navy because the safety and defense of the British Empire depended primarily on its navy. In the period of fierce competition between the colonial powers, Indian teak, the most durable of shipbuilding, saved British during a war with Napoleon and the later maritime expansion. To tap the likely sources supply, search parties were sent to teak forests of India's west coast. Ships were built in the dockyards in the Surat and the Malabar Coast, as well as in England by importing teak from India.
The revenue orientation of colonial land policy also worked towards the denudation of forests. As their removal added to the class of land assessed for revenue, forests were considered as an obstruction to agriculture and consequently a bar to the prosperity of the British Empire. The dominant thrust of agrarian policy was to extend cultivation and the watchword of the time was to destroy the forest with this end in view.
This process greatly intensified in the early years of the building of the railways network after about 1853. While great chunks of forests were destroyed to meet the demand for railway sleepers, no supervision was exercised over the felling operation in which a large number of trees was felled and lay rotting on the road. The sub-Himalayan forests of Garhwal and Kumaon, for example were all felled in even to desolation and thousands of trees were felled which were never removed, nor was their removal possible.
As early as 1805, the British government requested the British East India Company, which already controlled large parts of the coastal regions, to investigate the feasibility of harvesting Malabar teak in Madras to meet the needs of British shipbuilding during the Napoleonic war. Although the East India Company was a private trading company commissioned in 1600, in India it functioned as a state entity, enjoying a monopoly of trade in the areas it ruled. Acting at the direction of the British parliament, it shared authority in India with government officials. The company appointed a former police officer, Captain Watson, as India's first conservator of forests in 1806. Watson's two-pronged plan involved placing a tax on teak in order to simultaneously slow its harvest by private interests and raise money for the government, and then purchasing the teak from the private dealers.
Together, these measures would guard against over-exploitation and ensure a steady supply of teak.
On 3 August 1855, Lord Dalhousie, the governor general of India, reversed previous laissez-faire policy to establish the India Forest Department and annex large areas of sparsely populated lands in India. These lands were declared protected areas and staffed by foresters, fireguards, rangers, and administrators. Over the next decades, forestry in India became an international profession with global specialists ruling an empire of trees and grasslands.
The new environmental policies served in turn to support British imperialism in India. Unlike the conservative French and English royal forests reserved for hunting by the privileged elite, or the later American concept of total protection in national parks, the new colonial environmentalism was intended to generate income for the imperial British state through strict control of India's natural resources. Lord Dalhousie's new forest policies greatly expanded British authority over the land and people of India, a colonial empire that the British had procured piecemeal over the course of several centuries of mercantile and military exploitation. Thus, environmentalism and imperialism have a shared past, and the newly protected forests marked a symbiotic alliance of environmental concern with expansion of state power in India.
After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, however, the navy had less need of teak, and a new governor of Madras, Thomas Munro, felt that the timber royalty unnecessarily raised the opposition of Indian princes who objected to the tax placed on forests under their authority. Munro also felt pressure from Indian merchants who objected strenuously to a tax that cut severely into their profits and from peasants who saw traditional access to the forest sharply curtailed. The new governor rescinded the teak regulations, abolished Captain Watson's position, and allowed the free market to operate as it had before
Lord Dalhousie's tenure as governor-general from 1848 to 1856 saw the acquisition of territory and implementation of administrative reforms for which posterity dubbed Dalhousie "the great Proconsul." Dalhousie's support for conservation was unapologetically imperialist. Upon reaching the capital at Calcutta for his inauguration in 1848, he proclaimed, "we
are Lords Paramount of India, and our policy is to acquire as direct a dominion over the territories in possession of the native princes, as we already hold over the other half of India." The British government in India made it clear that "all the forests are the property of Government, and no general permission to cut timber therein will be granted to anyone. "
The second half of the 19th century marked the beginning of an organized forest management in India with some administrative steps taken to conserve forest; the formulation of forest policy and the legislations to implement the policy decision. The systematic management of forest resources began with the appointment of the First Inspector General of Forest in 1964. Dietrich Brandis was the first Inspector General of India. Lord Canning appointed Dietrich Brandis as the first inspector general of the India-wide Indian Forest Department, a post he held from 1864 to 1883. The immediate task of the forest department was under the supervision of Inspector General was that of exploration of resources, demarcation of reserves, protection of the forest from fire and assessment of the growing stock in valuable reserve by sample enumeration and prescription of yields which could be sustained. The objective of management of forest thus changed from obtaining of timber for various purposes to protecting and improving forests and treating them as a biological growing entity. Forest conservators had already been appointed in Bombay (1847), Madras (1856), and the United Burma Provinces (1857); Brandis in turn appointed forest conservators to the Northwestern Provinces and Central Provinces in 1860, Oudh in 1861, Punjab in 1864, Coorg and Bengal in 1864, Assam in 1868, and Berar in 1868. By the end of 1868, the Forest Department had administrators in every province of the subcontinent. In 1871, the Forest Department was placed under the newly established Department of
Revenue and Agriculture, itself under the umbrella of the Home Department. Brandis was followed by Wilhelm Schlich (1883-88), Berthold Ribbentrop (1888-1900), and E. P. Stebbings (1900-17) .
In
The first step of the British Government to assess state monopoly right over the forest was the enactment the Forest Act, 1865.
the act was revised after about thirteen years later in 1878 and extended to most of the territories under the British rule. It also
expanded the powers of the state by providing for reserved forest, which were closed to the people and by empowering the forest administration to impose penalties for any transgression of the provision of the Act. Yet the latter act was passed only after a prolonged and biter debate within the protagonist of the earlier debate put forth arguments strikingly similar to those advanced by participants in the contemporary debate about the environment of India.
Hurriedly drafted, the 1865 act was passed to facilitate the acquisition of those forest areas that were earmarked for railway
supplies. It merely sought to establish the claims of the state to the forests in immediately required, subject to the proviso that existing rights would not be abridged. Almost immediately, the search commenced for a more stringent and inclusive piece of legislation. A preliminary draft, prepared by Brandis in 1969, was circulated among the various presidencies. A conference of forest officers, convened in 1874, then went into defects of the 1865 act and the details of the new one.
The British Government declared its first Forest Policy by a resolution on the 19th October 1884. The policy statement had the following objectives:
1. Promoting the general well being of the people in the country;
2. Preserving climatic and physical condition in the country; and
3. Fulfilling the need of the people
The policy also suggested a rough functional classification of forest into the following four categories:
1. Forests, the preservation of which was essential for climatic and physical grounds;
2. Forests which offered a supply a valuable timber for commercial purposes;
3. Minor forest which produced only the inferior sort of timber; and
4. Pastures, which were forest only in name.
To implement the Forest policy of 1884, the Forest act of 1927 was enacted. Till 1935, the government of India enacted the Forest Act. In 1935, the British Parliament through the Government of India created provincial legislature and the subject of the forest as included in the provincial legislature list. Thereafter, several provinces made their own laws to regulate forest. Most of these laws were within the framework laid down in the 1927 Act . The British all along their reign in India formed many other Acts from time to time.
Did you know?
Van Mahotsava (the festival of trees) is celebrated every year throughout the country
in the first week (1st to 7th) of July at the onset of the monsoon. Lakhs of saplings of
different tree species are planted with active involvement of government agencies
like the Forest Department. In July 1947 a successful tree plantation drive was
undertaken in
Prasad and Abdul Kalam Azad participated along with many others. The week was
celebrated in a well-organized manner in a number of states all over the country. In
the early 1950s late Shri K. M. Munshi, noted educationist and nature lover, named
this movement 'Van Mahotsava'. Massive tree plantation drives were conducted with
active involvement of the local population.
After independence
With the independence of
The new Forest Policy of 1952 recognized the protective functions of the forest and aimed at maintaining one-third of
The next 50 years saw development and change in people’s thinking regarding the forest. A constructive attitude was brought about through a number of five-year plans. Until 1976, the forest resource was seen as a source of earning money for the state and therefore little was spent in protecting it or looking after it.
In 1976, the governance of the forest came under the concurrent list. ‘Development without destruction’ and ‘forests for survival’ were the themes of the next two five-year plans, aiming at increasing wildlife reserves and at linking forest development with the tribal economy. But a large gap between aim and achievement exists still.
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