Focusing on woods and trees

Book review of Reliving the Memories of an Indian Forester: Memoir of S Shyam Sunder

This is a rare memoir that abounds in anecdotes with an insider’s view of four decades of the Indian forest landscape. S Shyam Sunder, who joined the Madras Forest Service in 1952 and retired in 1990, was a veteran forester.

Clearly based on his dairies as also a prodigious memory, this book is edited by his son and environmental policy scholar Shivsharan Someshwar. The book interweaves his career with wider institutional and environmental changes, some of which he was to help reshape. But the editor’s hand is light and it has the ease of a fine narrative.

Mr Shyam Sunder is not one to mince words. Even as the acreage and quality of forest have dwindled, there are more officials; 75 chief conservators in Karnataka hold office now where one had once sufficed. Forest officers such as him spent 10 days a month in the woods, a practice he says now lives on only in memory. Foresters today tend as much to plantations as to natural mixed species forests.

This is a portrait of the emergence of forestry from the shadow of princely and imperial rule. In the early years after independence, it had a critical role in providing industrial raw material as well as land for agricultural extension.

Mr Shyam Sunder was among the first in his service to grasp the vulnerability of forest ecosystems to the new pressures.  He sought to devise new approaches. These often courted controversy, but his field knowledge of not just silviculture, but also other branches of technical forestry and  his understanding of ground-level social and economic change helped.

Forests were seen as potential arable land. Most significant is the way the reserved forests, where rights were recorded and settled, were opened up by provincial governments till as late as 1980. The enactment of the Forest Conservation Act made consent of the Union government essential.

Instances of timely intervention abound in the book. As divisional forest officer in Shimoga, Mr Shyam Sunder had evicted encroachers from 7,000 acres. In 1973 he records how foresters lobbied then Karnataka governor Dharma Vira to set aside over a 100 sq. km area near Bengaluru that may have been opened up as reserved forest. This was to become the Bannerghatta National Park.

It is Karnataka forest minister K H Patil, who held the portfolio between 1972 and 74 and again in 1977-78, who stands out as visionary. He came from a semi-arid district himself and was quick to appreciate the wider agro-climatic role of the fine forests in the Western Ghats. He reversed a proposal to de-reserve 100,000 acres of forest in North Kanara.  Going further he got the state Forest Act to make it essential to have legislative approval before de-reserving a forest. 

Reliving the Memories of an Indian Forester: Memoir of S Shyam Sunder

Author: Shivsharan Someshwar

Publisher: Manipal University Press

Price: Rs 450; Pages: 404

This was six years before the federal Forest Conservation Act.

By the time Mr Shyam Sundar became the top forester in Karnataka, the department managed over 10 million acres of reserved forests. These were widely diverse in ecological terms from wet evergreen or rain forest areas in the Western Ghats to scrub jungle in semi-arid areas in the old Mysore state.

As chief conservator of forests (CCF) in Karnataka and then as principal CCF in the 1980s, he worked with chief ministers Gundu Rao and later the legendary R K Hegde. Gundu Rao’s obsession with tree planting (which he hoped would please the prime minister) led him to entrust the task to the foresters. Some 100,000 trees were planted in 1981 alone.

The larger insight from this book is of an era prior to liberalisation where the government and public sector drove growth and often took unwise decisions on the environment. But there was room for corrective action, and this was not only in terms of blocking projects or keeping land under government control.

Mr Shyam Sunder was a major proponent of a variety of exotic species that would help meet industrial demand, though these were for barren areas and farm land and not to replace natural forests. Nearly 40 years ago he initiated steps to reduce the level and intensity of logging in protected areas and many reserved forests. But it was in propagating eucalyptus on farm land that he stirred a hornet’s nest. By funding protesting farmers for a trip to Gujarat, where they met with those practising agro-forestry, Mr Shyam Sunder won over the critics.

The larger issue posed by the book is the insights it offers into forestry for the public purpose.  A balancing act would keep forest cover intact where ecologically vital and  also promote “production forestry” to meet demand for industry or housing.

The author sketches out a role for the forester in keeping extraction in check and enabling regeneration. What stands out is his deep knowledge of local-level needs for wood and housing and ways to regulate grazing and lopping to enable regrowth.

This is a book vital to those with a love of India’s forests and also to anyone who wants to know how a life in public service as a specialist can leave a lasting mark. It is even more relevant given the huge pressures of large development projects on the scarce but vital forest estate.

The reviewer teaches History and Environmental Studies at Ashoka University