India’s forest sector is one of the most complex in the world; in it strict state regulation, a colonial legacy, enormous demand for timber and the rights of hundreds of millions of local people collide with one another. Forestry in India rests on centralised state control, and in recent years it has been looking for compromises between the development of the sector, strict nature protection and public discontent.

The development of forest management in India can be compared very precisely and vividly with the principle of the wheel of samsara, the eternal cycle of rebirth and of cause and effect. The comparison helps to show that India’s relationship with the forest is not linear progress but a continuous cycle, in which every step produces consequences, known as karma, and every stage is reborn in a new form, carrying with it the legacy of the stages before it.

Four cycles of rebirth: the historical stages of Indian forestry

Just as the soul in the wheel of samsara passes through different forms of existence, Indian forestry has gone through radical “rebirths”, in which each new stage has been a reaction to the sins of the one before it.

The first life was a kind of pre-colonial harmony. The forest as a spiritual and communal space. People and nature coexisted, and the forest was respected and honoured. The second life is colonial exploitation, a violent rebirth into materialism. The British Empire turned the forest into a pure commodity and a resource for the railways. In this stage heavy “negative karma” accumulated: local people were driven out and ecosystems were laid waste. The third life is post-revolutionary industrialisation, when independent India took over the colonial bureaucracy and carried on logging in the name of its own state. This is the phase of illusion, or Maya , in which the state believes that centralised control will bring prosperity. The fourth life, in turn, is ecological awakening and agroforestry, when the circle closes. The state realises that by destroying the forests it is killing its own land. India returns to the idea of involving communities and planting trees, which resembles an attempt to purify itself and accumulate good karma.

Cause and effect in the forest: the karmic approach

At the heart of samsara lies the inescapable law of karma: every action produces consequences that cannot be escaped. In Indian forestry this shows itself both physically and legally. Colonial expropriation in India created the karma of social unrest. When the British took the tribes’ rights to the forest away in the 19th century, centuries of conflict followed. Today’s protests, violent clashes and dissatisfaction with new laws are the direct consequences of what was done then. The degradation of forests in the past returns today as devastating floods, soil erosion and drought. India is literally “atoning for its sins”, spending billions through the CAMPA fund to plant new forests in place of those that were cut down.

A look at the history of Indian forestry

During the Mughal Empire, in the medieval period, forests mainly belonged to local rulers or to the state, and their use by the public was comparatively free. Forests were largely regarded as an inexhaustible resource, as hunting grounds and as a natural barrier against invaders. At the same time the export of valuable timber to the Arabian and Persian regions began. In the colonial period, when the British ruled India, forests were exploited sharply and aggressively for shipbuilding and for building the railway network. In 1864 the British established the Imperial Forest Department and passed the Indian Forest Act (1878), which centralised control in the hands of the state and took historical rights away from local communities. After independence was declared, in 1952 India nationalised the forests that had previously belonged to the feudal landowners, the zamindars. Until 1988 the priority was commercial timber extraction. The National Forest Policy of 1988 changed that course, setting ecological stability as the main objective, together with the goal of bringing forest cover to 33% of the country’s territory.

Forest ownership and governance

In present-day India about 97% of all forest area belongs to the state. It is administered mainly by the state Forest Departments. Under the Indian Forest Act, forests are divided legally into four types.

Protected forests in India currently account for more than 50% of the total area; they are strictly controlled by the government, and commercial activity, felling and livestock grazing are entirely prohibited in them. Partly protected forests take up about a third of the area. They are state controlled, and local people are allowed to gather dry firewood and non-timber products and to graze livestock, provided this does not cause significant damage to the forest. Unclassified forests take up about 16% of the country’s area; these are the forests with the fewest restrictions. They also include small areas owned by communities and private individuals: the overall share of purely private forest in India is around 3%.

In the 1990s India introduced a model in which the state works together with local villages, granting them rights to non-timber products in exchange for help in restoring the forest. The 2006 forest rights law (Forest Rights Act, FRA), in turn, legally recognised historical tribes and communities as entitled to manage their traditional forest territories, although in practice enforcement of the law still meets resistance from officials.

Timber processing, imports and exports

India is one of the world’s largest consumers of timber, and its domestic industrial extraction in state forests is strictly limited in order to halt the irreversible clearing of forests. The country has therefore become a marked importer of timber. It is worth stressing that India has a highly developed industry producing plywood, veneer, wooden furniture, pulp, paper and traditional handicrafts. A large part of that industry rests on timber from small private plantations and from agroforestry, grown on agricultural land rather than obtained by logging state forests.

Imports of wood products reached about 2.41 billion US dollars in 2024. To protect nature, India keeps customs rates low on unprocessed round timber so that value is added locally. The main suppliers of timber are Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia and Uruguay. Tropical timber dominates, for example teak and meranti, as well as pine. The volume of exports is considerably smaller: in 2024 it was around 851 million US dollars. India mainly exports high value added products, for example designer furniture and wooden handicrafts, to the USA, the United Arab Emirates and Europe.

Nature protection requirements in India

India’s environmental legislation is among the toughest in the region, and exceptions to it are regularly made for infrastructure development.

Under the Forest Conservation Act (1980), forest land may not be converted to any “non-forestry” purposes, such as extractive industry or road building, without the direct permission of India’s central government. If a company or a state project is granted permission to clear a compartment of forest, it is obliged to cover in full the cost of planting a new forest elsewhere, on degraded or non-forest land. Investors must pay the forest’s net present value (Net Present Value, NPV) in order to compensate financially for the lost ecosystem. These funds, measured in billions of dollars, are managed by the state CAMPA fund.

The Indian government has recently made amendments that allow private companies to carry out commercial tree planting in degraded state forest areas, removing the requirement to pay NPV or to carry out compulsory compensatory afforestation. This has been done to attract private capital and to reduce the shortfall in the paper and furniture industries.

Indian attitudes to logging

Public attitudes to forestry in India are fairly polarised and often grow into sharp social conflicts. Indian culture has a historically deep respect for forests, and Indians have what are known as sacred groves. Famous historical movements, such as the Chipko movement, in which rural women embraced trees to stop them being felled, have created strong public resistance to any industrial logging. Local Adivasi tribes and rights defenders see the government’s new decisions of 2025 and 2026, which let private corporations into state forests to establish plantations, as a “land grab”. They point out that plantations of monocultures such as eucalyptus destroy biological diversity and cut local people off from their sources of livelihood. Industry representatives, on the other hand, hold that over-bureaucratised environmental laws and grey areas of legality hold back economic growth and force India to spend billions on buying foreign timber, even though the country could supply itself by managing its degraded areas more efficiently.

The paradox of control and protection

Let us return to Indian mythology. Maya is the illusion that makes people perceive the world wrongly and holds them captive in the wheel of samsara. In India’s forest governance the greatest illusion is its strict legal framework. On paper the country has some of the strictest nature protection laws in the world, for example the Forest Conservation Act of 1980. In reality, corruption, illegal logging and lobbies get around those laws. The state lives in the illusion that by entering an area in the category of “protected forest” it has made it safe, while in real life the ecosystem continues to degrade.

The wheel of samsara is turned by three fundamental vices, or “poisons”. One of them is ignorance, avidya, which shows itself in a state bureaucracy that long believed the forest was best protected by an official from the city rather than by a member of a tribe who had lived in it for a thousand years. The striving for truth, in turn, began with movements such as Chipko, in which rural people demonstrated the highest understanding of the inseparability of nature and humanity. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 was an attempt to achieve a legal “striving for truth”, finally recognising the rights of indigenous peoples.

The final destination of samsara is moksha – escape from the vicious circle and complete freedom. In the context of Indian forestry, moksha would mean a state in which full balance is achieved. The country would no longer be forced to destroy natural forest for the sake of infrastructure, and the negative karma would be broken. The needs of industry would be met entirely by agroforestry, that is, by trees on agricultural land. India’s local communities would live in harmony and manage the forests without bureaucratic pressure. Yet the latest decisions of the Indian government, and the admission of private corporations into state forests to establish plantations, show that the wheel of samsara in India has made another turn. The country is returning once again to the idea of commercialisation, which means that forestry continues its unceasing cycle of rebirth, conflict and purification.

Sources: Zemeunvalsts.lv, information sites of India, the European Union and the United Kingdom