Forests, Environment and Sustainable Development in India

The present edited book is an attempt to describe different aspects of forests, environment and sustainable development in India. The book covers a broad scenario of forests in the country. The Sustainable Forest Management program in India is one of the largest co-management efforts in natural resource conservation in the world. Apart from providing livelihoods to forest dependent populations, forests provide crucial subsistence needs of housing materials, food, medicine, fuel-wood, small timber and non-timber forest products. Since the colonial era, forest dwellers and traditional stakeholders, including tribal populations have been deprived of forest ownership and usufruct rights. The primary objective of Sustainable Forest Management is to ensure sustainable use of forests to meet local needs equitably while ensuring environmental sustainability and conservation. It is hoped that this study will be found useful by policy makers, experts, scholars and academicians in the field and will be a welcome addition to the literature on forests, environment and sustainable development. This is a timely publication in the sense that it has presented some thought-provoking papers.