What is commercial forestry and how it was imposed by Britishers ?
Answers
Answer:
What do you mean by commercial forestry?
Commercial forestry is basically aimed for selling of forest goods like timber and firewood and services to fulfill market demands.
Why did British government start commercial forestry in India?
Ans : - The colonial government started commercial forestry in India because : 1) By the early 19th century oak forest in England were disappearing.The colonial Government needed timber for ship and railways. 2) The Government took over the forest in India and gave vast areas to European planters at cheap rates.
Answer:
Colonialism in India initiated fundamental changes in patterns of resource use, notably forests, and has been described by some workers as a ‘watershed’ in the history of the subcontinent (Gadgil and Guha, 1992). Prior to the arrival of the British, forest land was a common property resource. Far from being an open-access system that Hardin (1968) describes, India’s forests were managed, and their use was strictly mediated by social institutional structures such as caste (Gadgil and Guha, 1992) and cultural traditions (Gadgil et al, 1993).
According to the 1878 Forest Act, three types of forest were to be designated; Reserved, protected, and village. Reserved forests were deemed the most commercially valuable and amenable to sustained exploitation. Overall state control of reserved forests was sought, which involved either the relinquishment, or transferral of other claims and rights, although very occasionally, limited access was granted. Legally, channels to contest the reservation of forests existed, though rural communities had little experience with legal procedures, and illiterate villagers were often unaware that a survey and demarcation was in process (Poffenberger et al, 1998). Protected forests were similarly state controlled, but some concessions were granted, conditional to the reservation of commercial tree species, when they became valuable. Protected forests could also be closed to fuelwood collection and grazing, whenever it was deemed necessary to do so. As timber demand for empire increased, it was found the limited control the state had granted itself to be inadequate, thus many protected forests were re-designated as reserved forests. The act also provided for a third designation of forests in its constitution, village forests, though according to Gadgil and Guha (1992), this was not exercised by the colonial government over most of India. The area of forest appropriated by the state in 1878 was 14,000 square miles, which had increased to 81,400 and 3300 square miles, for reserved and protected forests respectively, by 1900 (Stebbing, 1922). In east India, state appropriation of forest land often involved the dispossession of adivasi communities' ancestral land. In the Singhbum District of Bihar, large-scale encroachment by the Forest Department in the late nineteenth century dispossessed the Ho tribe from their villages and surrounds in an attempt to demarcate a reserve forest. The reservation was noted by the Settlement officer of the day as 'one great encroachment', and created conflict between the Ho and Forest Department which escalated into a 'tree war', one that still periodically erupts (Corbridge and Jewitt, 1997).
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