FORESTRY IN INDIA FROM A CANADIAN POINT 



OF VIEW 



By H. R. MacMillan^ 



The first shock to a Canadian traveling in India is the wooded 

 state of the country. One expects that hundreds of millions of 

 people warring through thousands of years and finally under a cen- 

 tury of peace crowding agriciilturally 300 to 600 to the square mile 

 would have produced a denuded land. Such is not the case — 

 except in the arid Indus vaUey — ^the whole land, viewed from a 

 railway carriage, appears forested, and even the Ganges plain 

 with its agricultural half thousand to the square mile is so dotted 

 with trees as to appear at a distance of less than a mUe an un- 

 broken wall of forest. The temperament which leaves trees to 

 grow, in groves, rows and scattered throughout the most valuable 

 fields without even the protection of the fence row, which saves a 

 few trees in America, must have been an important factor in leav- 

 ing any forests for the British to administer in India. 



The forest area of British India now stands at about 336,000 

 square miles, or 31.1 per cent of the total land area. Though 

 the forest cannot all be considered as productive timber land, or 

 even as wooded land, as will be explained later, the proportion of 

 actual forest must to a Westerner appear very large, especially 

 when the age, history and population of the coimtry are con- 

 sidered. 



The large proportionate area of forest is explained by three or 

 four conditions wherein India differs fundamentally from Ameri- 

 can conditions, which act as brakes on forest destruction in 

 India. 



Recent Canadian experience to the contrary, the Indian is not 

 an emigrant. The strongest human tendency in Canada and the 

 United States has been to move west along the parallels of lati- 

 tude and destroy forest. The native North American has not 

 waited either for pressure of population upon the land or for a 

 market for the timber in the virgin Western forests to fiirnish the 

 stimulus for the Western movement of population. The Indian, 

 the direct antithesis of this man, even when the agricultural popu- 

 lation has reached 600 to the square mile ; has not felt impelled to 

 leave his ancestral paddy field and move a few hundred miles to 



1 Lately Chief, Forest Branch, British Columbia. 

 624 



