Forest Wealth of India: Inaccessible to Impoverished

A millennium year back, the entire Indian subcontinent is the ocean of dense forests with scattered islands of cultivation. The chronicles of Greek and Chinese writers recorded the luxurious forests which are inaccessible to man in the land between Himalayas and Vindyas. The economic and cultural life of the nation centred around rivers and forests and they were held to be sacred. Indian forest flora is very rich in composition and value. There are about 5000 species of woody trees in our forests, of which nearly 450 are commercially valuable. The major commercial products like creosote, methyl alcohol, lubricating and dyeing oils and valuable drugs like sulphonomide are extracting from these timber lands. Forests also provide the non-wood products such as rubber, latex, resins, gums, lac, incense, perfumes, fibres and tanning material and herbal medicines like belladona, aconite, atropa and cinchona etc. Our forest wealth is depleting and reducign its productivity due to recent ruthless and illicit cuttings. Population pressure and heavy animal grazing are mainly responsible for the poverty state of forests. It is estimated that forest cover which was 22 per cent during fiftees reduced to almost 10 per cent recently. There is an urgent need to revegetate the country by massive afforestation programmed to save the nation from the uses of ecological balance. The present book intends to acquint the reader with Indian forest types, assets of forest wealth, causes of forest depletion and their conseqences. The author presents in this books profiles of over 100 tree of our forests along with untamed life. The book is well illustrated and will be of great use to students, foresters, extension workers and gardeners.