Among the country?s natural resources, forests are perhaps the most vulnerable to human depredation. And what human beings destroy when they fail to preserve forests are not just trees, but an entire web of life, involving both flora and fauna (and human beings too), that has formed over centuries. So, although planting trees and other forms of vegetation are important modes of reforestation, the balance is never properly restored. Conservation is a delicate and complicated business that demands the proper coordination of laws, measures, attitudes and political will, all adapted to local ecologies and conditions. Hence the State of Forest Report 2003 confronts the ecologist with a set of figures as well as their official interpretation. The basic picture is unavoidably grim. The total increase in wooded area from 2001 to 2003 has been just 0.65 per cent. This is clear evidence that the current strategy of protection, afforestation and reforestation is not working. It is also evident that India will not be able to meet the target of expanding forest cover to a third of its territory by 2012, although the government?s self-congratulatory feel-good rests on being able to meet the 25 per cent forest-cover mark by 2007.

West Bengal seems to be implicated in this official feel-good. It seems to have made the maximum increase in forest cover from 2001 to 2003. Yet, there is an interpretative sleight of hand working behind such a claim. What has increased in West Bengal are non-forest and scrub areas with a canopy density of less than 10 per cent. But with respect to dense forests, the situation here is no less grim, and is similar to what is happening across the country, except perhaps in the North-east. In Karnataka, too, the expansion of open forest area masks the continuing depredation of dense forest cover. And this is where the report could be quite dangerously misleading in its presentation of the situation. The demands of development ? in the industrial and mining sectors, for instance ? might claim economic priority over ecological scruples, but a country with such a high population of tribals living off forests will have to fundamentally rethink its attitude to participatory protection. Indiscriminate urban development, uncontrolled poaching and plundering, and harmful agricultural methods are still unthinkingly perpetuated.