Forest and Wildlife Resources: Class 10 Geography · Chapter 2

An old banyan tree beside a village pond is almost a small town. Parakeets and mynas nest in its crown, fruit bats hang from its branches, tiny wasps breed inside its figs and squirrels race along its hanging roots. Picture thousands of such trees, each with its own crowd of tenants, and you have a forest: one of the busiest living systems on Earth.

Take away the forest and that town of tenants collapses, and in time so do we. The oxygen in each breath, the water seeping into a well, the soil of a wheat field: living things working together make or renew all of them. Forests sit at the base of this system. Their green plants are the primary producers, turning sunlight into food that every animal, including you, depends on in the end (Fig. 2.1). The variety of all this life, and the ties that bind it together, is called biodiversity (जैव विविधता).

2.1 Flora and Fauna in India

Some plants and animals belong so firmly to one region that they become its signature. Think of the khejri tree of the Thar, the Nilgiri tahr of the Western Ghats, or the red panda of Sikkim's misty forests. The plant life of a region is its flora (वनस्पतिजात) and its animal life is its fauna (प्राणिजात). Which ones are special to your district?

India ranks among the richest countries on Earth for biodiversity. It has only about 2.4 % of the world's land, yet it holds roughly 7–8 % of all recorded species (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change). It is one of 17 megadiverse countries. It also contains parts of four of the world's 36 biodiversity hotspots: the Himalaya, Indo-Burma, the Western Ghats and the Nicobar Islands. Your textbook adds that many more species, perhaps two or three times as many, are still waiting to be discovered.

You studied India's natural vegetation and wildlife in Class 9. They are woven into every ordinary day. Think of the paper in your notebook, the honey and spices in the kitchen, lac bangles, a bamboo ladder, or medicines made from neem and tulsi. Because they are always around, we hardly notice them. That carelessness, more than anything else, has put our forests and wildlife under severe pressure.

2.1.1 Why our flora and fauna are under stress

A forest rarely vanishes in one go. It is nibbled away, a field here and a road there, until the animals inside run out of room, food and safe paths (Fig. 2.2). The main human pressures are:

• Clearing land for farms, towns, factories and roads. Animals lose their habitat, and what remains is cut into small, separate patches.
• Large projects such as dams, which flood whole valleys of forest, and mines, which strip away trees and topsoil.
• Overuse: taking more fuelwood, timber and fodder, and grazing more cattle, than the forest can replace.
• Hunting and poaching for skins, bones, horns, tusks and meat, and catching live birds and animals for the illegal pet trade.
• Pollution of rivers, lakes and the sea by sewage, factory waste and farm chemicals, which kills fish, turtles and birds.
• Invasive plants such as lantana, brought from abroad, which spread through forests and crowd out the grasses and shrubs that wild animals eat.

2.2 Conservation of Forest and Wildlife in India

Wild animal numbers and forest area fell sharply during the twentieth century, so saving what is left has become urgent. Before looking at how India protects its forests and wildlife, let us be clear about why it should.

2.2.1 Why conserve?

Conservation is not only about saving beautiful animals. It protects four things that people cannot do without (Fig. 2.3):

• Our life-support system. Forests and wetlands keep the air breathable, store rainwater in the ground and hold soil in place.
• Ecological variety. Many kinds of living things, each doing its own job, keep an ecosystem working even when one part of it is harmed.
• Genetic diversity. Wild plants and old crop varieties carry genes for resisting disease, drought or salt. Plant breeders cross these genes into new crops, which is why the old varieties farmers once grew are still worth keeping.11In the 1970s plant breeders found a gene that protects rice from grassy stunt virus in a wild rice collected in Uttar Pradesh, and bred it into rice varieties later grown across Asia.
• Fisheries. Fish, prawns and crabs need clean water and the many small plants and animals of rivers, lakes and seas. Lose that variety and the catch collapses.

2.2.2 The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972

Imagine trying to save an animal that can be shot legally in one state and its skin sold openly in another. Naturalists who watched India's wildlife shrink through the 1960s wanted one law for the whole country. Parliament passed it in 1972: the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act. Its tools were these:

• It drew up an all-India list of protected species.
• It made hunting those animals a crime.
• It gave their habitats protection in law.
• It controlled trade in wild animals and in goods made from them, such as skins, ivory and horns.

Together they were meant to stop endangered species from slipping away for good. Protected areas followed, as the central and state governments created many national parks (राष्ट्रीय उद्यान) and wildlife sanctuaries, and later tiger reserves. These differ in how strictly people's use of the land is limited (Three kinds of protected area).

Beyond this general protection, the central government launched special projects for animals in the greatest danger. These included the tiger, the one-horned rhinoceros, the hangul (Kashmir stag) and the Asiatic lion. Three crocodilians got one too: the mugger (freshwater crocodile), the saltwater crocodile and the gharial. More recently, other animals have been shielded, fully or partly, from hunting and from the wildlife trade everywhere in India. They include the snow leopard, the great Indian bustard (godawan), the Indian elephant, the blackbuck and the chinkara.22Your textbook writes ‘black buck (chinkara)’, but these are two different antelopes: male blackbuck have long spiralling horns, while the chinkara is the smaller Indian gazelle.

2.2.3 Project Tiger

The tiger sits at the top of the forest food web. A forest that can feed tigers must also hold plenty of deer, wild pigs and gaur, and the grass, trees and water those animals need. So protecting tigers means protecting entire forests and everything in them. That is why tiger reserves are valued as much for the large habitats they save as for the tigers themselves.

By the early 1970s the tiger was close to vanishing. A count in 1972 found only 1,827 tigers in India, against an estimated 55,000 around 1900, the figures your textbook gives (Fig. 2.4). There were four main causes:

• Poaching: tiger skins fetched high prices, and the bones were ground into traditional medicines sold mainly elsewhere in Asia.
• Shrinking forests, cleared for farms, projects and settlements.
• Fewer prey animals, as deer and wild pigs were hunted or lost their habitat.
• More people living in and around tiger country, which brought more conflict.

Poachers concentrated on India and Nepal for a simple reason: between them, the two countries held around two-thirds of all the tigers left in the world. India launched Project Tiger on 1 April 1973, starting with nine tiger reserves, and it became one of the best-known wildlife campaigns anywhere. Since 2006 the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has run it. The 2022 estimate, published in 2023, put India's tigers at about 3,682, roughly three-quarters of all wild tigers on Earth.

Your textbook names these tiger reserves, which you should be able to place on a map of India:

• Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand
• Sundarbans National Park, West Bengal
• Bandhavgarh National Park, Madhya Pradesh
• Sariska Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajasthan
• Manas Tiger Reserve, Assam
• Periyar Tiger Reserve, Kerala

By March 2025 India had 58 tiger reserves in all (NTCA).

2.2.4 From a few animals to all of biodiversity

Which is easier to care about, a tiger or a beetle? Early conservation chose the tiger, the rhino and the lion. Yet an ecosystem also runs on its small members: bees and butterflies pollinate flowers, and beetles break down dung. So protection has widened from a few star species to biodiversity as a whole. The Wildlife Act's lists now hold several hundred butterflies, moths and beetles and one dragonfly, added through notifications in 1980 and 1986. Plants came later, with six species listed in 1991 as the first. A 2022 amendment regrouped every protected species into four schedules.

2.3 Types and Distribution of Forest and Wildlife Resources

Deciding to protect forests is the easy part; running them is far harder. India's forests spread over hills, plains, deltas and deserts, and millions of people depend on them. The government is the main owner and manager: state forest departments, and a few other departments, look after most forest land. To manage it, the land is placed in three legal categories (Fig. 2.5):

• Reserved forests (आरक्षित वन): over half of all forest land falls in this category, and it is the most prized for conservation. Nothing may be done inside without the forest department's permission.
• Protected forests (रक्षित वन): close to a third of forest land. The forest department has notified them to stop them shrinking further, though local people may keep some recorded rights, such as gathering fallen wood.
• Unclassed forests (अवर्गीकृत वन): everything else, meaning forest and wasteland that may belong to the government, to private owners or to village communities.

The mix of categories varies a great deal from state to state (Table 2.3). In the north-eastern states most forests are unclassed, and local communities manage them themselves.

These lists come from older data: Telangana was separated from Andhra Pradesh in 2014, and Jammu and Kashmir became a Union Territory in 2019. In the board exam, use the textbook lists.

2.4 Community and Conservation

Protecting nature is an old idea in India, far older than any forest department. Many communities, tribal and others, also live in or beside forests and use them every day. Your textbook's photographs on page 14 show some of this:

• young tribal women planting bamboo seedlings in a nursery near Silent Valley, Kerala;
• women selling minor forest produce, the leaves, fruits, seeds and other non-timber goods gathered from forests, at a market;
• women carrying bundles of leaf litter from the forest, used as manure and as bedding for cattle.

Because their livelihoods depend on healthy forests, many communities now defend them, sometimes alongside government officials and sometimes entirely on their own:

• Villagers living in Rajasthan's Sariska Tiger Reserve turned the Wildlife Protection Act itself against mining in the reserve.
• Five villages of Alwar district (Rajasthan) declared their own 1,200-hectare wildlife sanctuary, the Bhairodev Dakav ‘Sonchuri’. Their rules ban hunting and keep outsiders from encroaching on the wildlife, and they want no role for the government.
• In the Chipko movement, which began in the Himalayas in 1973, villagers, many of them women, hugged trees to stop contractors felling them. Its success went beyond saving trees: villagers went on to plant native species on bare slopes, proving that forests replanted by local people can thrive.
• In Tehri, the Beej Bachao Andolan (Save the Seeds Movement) brought back the old seed varieties of the hills, and the Navdanya network runs community seed banks. Both show that a farm growing many crops without chemical fertilisers or pesticides can still feed a family and earn a living.

2.4.1 Joint forest management

Picture a hillside that the forest department owns but cannot guard. Villagers cut it for fuel, cattle graze it bare, and it degrades year after year. Joint forest management (JFM) (संयुक्त वन प्रबंधन) turns those villagers into its guards (Fig. 2.6). The village sets up its own committee to protect the degraded patch, while the department keeps ownership. The deal pays the village twice. Members may gather non-timber produce such as leaves, fruit and grass straight away, and they get a share of the timber once the forest they saved is harvested.

Odisha was the first state to adopt JFM by resolution, in 1988, and other states followed after central guidelines in 1990.

Again and again in this chapter, forests have recovered where the people living beside them had a stake: in Chipko villages, in Alwar, in Odisha's JFM committees. So any plan for forests, water or wildlife needs local people involved, although they still seldom have the final say. A useful test for any project has three questions. Does it serve the people who live there? Does it spare the environment? Does it make economic sense?

2.4.2 Sacred groves and nature worship

Walk into a sacred grove (पवित्र पेड़ों के झुरमुट) and you may find trees far older and taller than any in the surrounding countryside. No one has cut them because the grove belongs to a deity; these are, in a sense, forests of the gods and goddesses. Behind them lies an ancient tribal idea, that every part of nature is to be protected. A grove may be a small wood or a corner of a bigger forest, and either way local people do not touch it or let others do so. India has thousands of them, under many local names: devrai in Maharashtra, kavu in Kerala, oran in Rajasthan, sarna in Jharkhand. The sacred forest of Mawphlang in Meghalaya's Khasi hills is one of the best known.

Scientific names, for reference: mahua Bassia latifolia, kadamba Anthocephalus cadamba, tamarind Tamarindus indica, mango Mangifera indica. Faith protects more than trees. A spring believed to be holy is kept clean, and a peak sacred to a deity is left alone. At many temples, worshippers feed monkeys such as macaques and langurs every day and see them as part of the temple's life. In the Bishnoi villages of Rajasthan, blackbuck, chinkara, nilgai and peafowl wander among the houses, safe because the whole community refuses to harm them.