India’s Forests Are Shrinking in Plain Sight

CarbonCopy launches a new 4-part series on the state of India’s native forests, beginning in Chamba, where swollen rivers carried hundreds of cut logs downstream, a warning that India’s ecological foundations are fraying

As August sloshed to an end, the people of Chamba badly needed respite — and reassurance. It wasn’t to be. In that last week, rainfall, abnormally high all month, added further intensity. Dumping four times more rain than normal, it would leave Himachal Pradesh with the wettest August in 76 years.

Even as locals hoped these rains were an anomaly and that their little town’s ecological foundations were still secure, the Ravi delivered its own warning. After days and weeks of running in spate, the river washed hundreds of logs down to Chamba.

A video captured this moment. The river, swollen enough to lap at doorsteps, was eddying before a local bridge, spinning back on itself before rushing out from the left as a raging mud-brown torrent. Caught in this maelstrom, moving anti-clockwise along with the river, were hundreds of logs, all cut to the same length.

It wasn’t clear who had cut these. But, for locals standing on the bridge, the larger message was clear. Changing weather wasn’t Chamba’s only fraying ecological foundation. The forests above it were being hollowed out as well.

As it and other videos showing logs being swept down by rivers or pooling at dams did the rounds, India’s Supreme Court felt disturbed enough to take notice. 

A bench led by Chief Justice BR Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran said these videos suggested rampant and “prima facie illegal” tree-felling in the Himalayas and issued notices to the Ministries of Environment and Jal Shakti, the National Disaster Management Authority, the National Highways Authority of India, and the state governments of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu & Kashmir, asking them to explain the scale of the issue and the steps being taken to prevent further damage.

The Supreme Court needed to cast its net wider. Forests are in trouble across India.As books like Blood Sanders: The Great Forest Heist and countless media reports on illicit felling show, human pressure on India’s forests continues to be high. 

Large projects are decimating forests as well. The Great Nicobar port-city project is expected to clear 130 square kilometres of primary rainforest, felling anywhere between 1 million to 10 million trees. Another 4 million trees might be axed for the Ken-Betwa Link Project. Adani’s Parsa Kente Basan coalblock in Hasdeo Arand will claim 3.68 lakh trees. In Arunachal, Dibang Multipurpose Project will kill 3.2 lakh trees and Etalin hydel project will claim another 2.7 lakh trees. On the whole, just the projects cleared by India’s environment ministry between 2020 and 2022 will cull 2.3 million trees.

India’s response to these losses has been imperfect. As the trafficking of sandalwood and blood sanders has shown, India’s efforts to curb illegal trade in timber have not been a resounding success. Turn to large projects and the scorecard is not much better. India has tried to mitigate those forest losses by getting project proponents to plant an equivalent (or higher) number of trees. In effect, the country is losing native forests but adding plantations.

This, too, is a problem. A collection of trees doesn’t equal a forest. Over millions of years, each forest develops its own unique assemblage of inter-dependent species, which helps it regulate the water cycle, support forest-dwelling communities and, as in the hills, prevent erosion. For this reason, as Birute Galdikas writes in Reflections of Eden, her book on the Orangutans of Borneo, “replanted heavily logged areas and tree plantations (cannot) replace the complex forest ecosystem.” They cannot even sequester as much carbon as a native forest.  

And so, a large question needs to be asked. Between human pressure, timber trafficking and large projects, what percentage of India is now under native forests?

A new normal

Given the shifting baseline syndrome, each generation assumes the state of the environment, as inherited, as normal. People living near seas assume whale sightings are sporadic. People living in India assume the country’s forests were much the same as now, running along the Himalayas and the western ghats, the eastern ghats and, extending westwards from the latter into central India.

And yet, that is not how things always were. In the 4th or fifth century, when he wrote Meghadootam, Kalidasa described a country blanketed by forests. Even by the 1700s, much of India was still under forests. By this time, with the country’s population rising to about 165 million, forests were being cut for agricultural expansion and household use. And yet, given low life expectancy and reverential attitudes towards nature, pressure on forests stayed relatively low.

By 1864, as Shekhar Pathak writes in The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, undivided India had thick tree cover —  what we would perhaps call forests today — on 40% of its land. That year, however, the British took over India’s forests. Locals’ customary rights were removed. India saw the rise of industrial logging to feed demand from elsewhere. Between 1865 and 1885 alone, as Pathak writes, 65 million railway sleepers were sent from the Yamuna valley alone. 

With that, the country’s forests began to shrink. By 1880, as NRSA scientists have estimated, India’s forest cover had come down to 31.7%. By independence, it had shrunk further yet, accounting for no more than 40 million ha of India’s 328.7 million ha apart from the forests controlled by the princely states.

Despite independence, India’s forest bureaucracy continued to follow colonial principles. As Akhileshwar Pathak describes in Contested Domains: The State, Peasants and Forests in Contemporary India, both logging operations and denial of locals’ customary rights continued. By 1975, even after subsuming forests from the princely states, India’s forest cover had shrunk to 19.49%. Only in the 1980s, after mass movements like Chipko and Silent Valley, did India’s forests win a reprieve.

The Forest Conservation Act of 1980 put forest and biodiversity conservation centre-stage. Logging is reduced in importance. As shown in Michael Lewis’s Inventing Global Ecology: Tracing the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1945-1997, the notion of forests with inviolate cores and buffers where locals could exercise customary rights came in. As did the notion of compensatory afforestation to replace losses from forest diversions. By this time, though, India’s forest cover stood at 18.34%.

What has happened since?

Since the nineties, however, India has seen a paradox take root.  The country has seen a jump in both the numbers and aspirations of communities living near forests. In tandem, large projects have made their own inroads into forests.

Legal amendments have facilitated forest diversions. Between 1994 and now, India’s environment ministry has severely diluted India’s environmental clearance process, creating an outcome where projects are almost never rejected on environmental grounds and almost all applications for forest diversion get approved. Between these processes, as the people of Chamba saw in August, India continues to lose forests.

Despite these mounting pressures, however, the Forest Survey of India (FSI) says the country’s forest cover has grown from 18.34% in 1980 to 19.44% in 1991; 20.64% in 2003; 21.05% in 2011; and 21.76% in 2023.

The proximate answer to that conundrum is well-known. Not only does the FSI follow an expansive definition of forests — counting as forest any land patch bigger than a hectare with tree canopy density over 10 percent (regardless of its land use, ownership, or tree species) — it also clubs plantation and forest data while calculating India’s forest cover.

Seen one way, it has little choice. The country has committed to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5-3 billion tonnes through additional forest and tree cover by 2030. “That is possible only if 33% of the country’s geographic area is under forests,” said Uma Shankar Singh, a now-retired IFS officer from Uttar Pradesh.

And yet, as this article said above, plantations do not equal forests.

How are India’s native forests doing?

India’s native forest cover could have grown despite human pressure and industrial projects under two conditions. One. The country had to curb illicit felling of forest trees — whether for local use or by timber traffickers.

Two. It had to offset forest losses from industrial and infrastructure projects through high-quality afforestation, as at Rao Jodha National Park or Nature Conservation Foundation’s forest restoration work at Valparai, both of which give the original forest a chance to revive.

In May, CarbonCopy began taking a closer look at these questions. While much has been written about India’s afforestation drives — and the low survival rates that plague them — the country’s response to illegal logging and timber trafficking is under-explored. And so, the second part of this series picks up Khair, or Acacia Catechu, for a closer look.

The tree, which grows along riverine tracts in the hills, is under heavy demand from India’s pan masala industry. How well is the forest department managing its demand?

Link for the Part 2 of the series: https://carboncopy.info/how-indias-pan-masala-boom-is-stripping-its-forests/