Forests and Forestry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Forests and Forestry - Essay Example The evolution of deforestation in India has begun with the arrival of British government in India during 19th century. During the year of 1823, the governor of presidency during that period, Thomas Munro acted as a forest conservator with a belief that private business practices of forestry programs will be adopted soon to meet the balance of supply and demand. Due to this belief the country faced a continuous loss of forest resources for almost four consecutive decades. The developmental steps taken by the British government supported the act of deforestation in India. When the government realized the problem during 1864 the Governor-general Lord Dalhousie brought the German forester Dietrich Brandis to look after the problem and control the situation. Many more initiatives were taken afterwards in order to conserve the forests resources of India by recruiting manpower for the protection and control over the loss of the natural resource. It took almost another decade after these ini tiatives were taken up for the conservation of forest resource, to come into effect and proper law and orders were passed for the protection of the resource and resulted into Indian Forest Act in 1878. After the law and orders came into effect the situation was supposed to be under control but corruption adversely influenced them a lot and developmental activities were prioritized over the issue of deforestation. The corruption restricted the law and orders to show its proper effectiveness which is persistent till date. Deforestation activities can be beneficial also in cases where the cleared land can be used for the agricultural and farming activities. The technologies used for agricultural purpose still fails sometimes to sustain the farming and agricultural activities on certain tropical land formed by clearing of forest areas. Those lands are either made abandoned or used as less productive areas compared to other land used for agriculture and