Managing the Forest for Sustainable Development: A Study of Indian States

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Forestry / Forestry Economics, Aligarh Muslim University (Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India; Department of Economics), language: English, abstract: Forest is an important renewable resource and play vital role in the economic development of a developing country like India since the existence of human civilizations. They are rich sources of energy, housing, firewood, timber and fodder and they provide employment to a large section of the rural population. They also plays critical role in maintaining the ecological balance. The present consumption level and supply of forest products reveals that there is shortage of supply of forest products in comparison to its demand for various purposes except for wrapping, packaging paper and paper board and it is also expected to increase in near future because of rising population and growing economy which will make the realization of goal of sustainable development more difficult. Since we can neither stop the growth of population nor we can restrict the development of our country, there is only one option i.e. increasing the forest cover area and the density of existing forests. For this purpose we will find out those states in which there is shortfall of forest cover against the standard forest area. The result of the study reveals that the states like Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalya, Mizoram, Assam, Nagaland and Tripura are in comfortable position and there is no need to over emphasis on the management of forest in these states. But for the states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan Tamil Nadu,Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal etc. the forest cover area is not comfortable and there is need to manage the forest and adopt the policy of aforestation especially in wasteland