CHAPTER IV. 



IMPROVEMENT FELLINGS. 



So many of our forests have come down to us in a ruined condi- 

 tion that one of the most, if not the most important, problem that 

 presents itself for solution to the Indian forester is how to treat 

 those forests, so that while supplying from them the- wants of the 

 country to the utmost limit of which they are capable and paying 

 into the Public Exchequer a large and steadily increasing surplus 

 revenue, they may be brought as cpiickly as possible to their high- 

 est condition of productiveness. The solution of tins problem, 

 enormously difficult in itself, is rendered doubly so by four several 

 circumstances which have operated against the progress of forest 

 conservancy since its inception. The first one of these circum- 

 stances is the popularly accepted view that the Forest Department 

 is principally and essentially a branch of the Revenue Department 

 and that its work should tiierefore b© gauged by the figures of its 

 Annual Budget. The second circumstance is the extreme poverty 

 of the people and the consequent miserably low standard of comfort 

 prevailing among them. As long as three-fourths of the popula^- 

 tion are content to live, or cannot help living, in squalid huts open 

 to all the inclemencies of the weather and containing no more 

 furniture than a rudely made bed, and subsist on the cheapest and 

 most easily prepared fare that is just barely sufficient to keep body 

 and soul together, so long will it be impossible to work out, except 

 at a heavy loss, the immense quantities of unsound, crooked, knotty 

 stunted trees of valuable species as well as of large, well- grown 

 timber of inferior kinds which mainly compose the present stock 

 in those forests. The third circumstance is the necessity of sup- 

 plying the vast wandering herds of cattle sufficient pasturage to 

 keep them ahve. The fourth and last circumstance, which is 

 happily now rapidly disappearing, is the opposition every where 

 encountered by the Forest Department and based on the erroneous 

 idea that it has interests necessarily antagonistic to the general 

 interests of the country, and that when it only safe-guards the 

 rights of succeeding generations in limiting the enjoyment of the 

 present generation to the strict usufruct of the forests, it acts as an 

 oppressor of the people. 



