‘And the bamboo flowers in the Indian forests ’ What did the pulp and paper industry do?
Volume I & II, Manorama Savur, published by IDPAD Manohar, 2003, Pp 715, Rs 1,500

The face of Indian forests has changed and continues to change. The component of bamboo forests requires special examination because of their pronounced role in the social and economic life of rural India. The two volume in-depth study of bamboo forests titled ‘And the bamboo flowers in the Indian forests’ by Manorama Savur is rooted in the fact that people use products from nature for their development. Therefore, the question “What did the pulp and paper industry do?” to the bamboo forests has become a relevant question in the Indian context.
The study is based on three assumptions:

• Forests are complex ecosystems and trees by themselves do not make a forest.
• Forests are life-support systems. The impact of their biological functions is a recent discovery. But cultural historians have shown that forests were the most useful environments for the social and cultural evolution of humans.
• Tropical forests are fragile ecosystems.

There are no inherent contradictions between human beings and nature. Contradictions appeared very late in history when, instead of maintaining harmony with nature during social development, humans exploited nature knowingly and recklessly, and became responsible for the breakdown of the forests ecosystem.
Why and how did the face of Indian forests begin to change and the regressive trend begin? To find answers to this and such other questions, Savur’s study is a useful guide.
During colonial rule, the colonial foresters merely classified the original and the retrogressed forests into such categories as wet evergreen, moist deciduous, dry deciduous and scrub forests, in that order. Other disciplines categorised forests without explaining that the present state of the forests was the result of retrogressive process, a rapid reversal in natural history.
Savur points out with necessary details that if other disciplines have correlated the forest types with climate, relief, soil, drainage, etc., it is because of the attempts by wet evergreen forests to adapt and rehabilitate themselves to a lower evolutionary stage within the given environmental conditions, as colonial and post-colonial pressures on the forests mounted. There are no contradictions between the natural and social history of the local people whether they were the adivasi, the original inhabitants of the forest, or the more advanced agricultural communities. The contradictions arose only when the pace of change was accelerated by outsiders, a process which the vulnerable insiders could not rectify.
The main concern of the study is with forest raw material. Being thus concerned, Savur analysed brilliantly and boldly the way State power was utilised during colonial rule as well as in independent India, to plunder the riches of the forest and to destroy the inbuilt eco-balance.
Savur shows how the European merchant class was the first to deal a death blow to the fragile forest ecosystem, rich in timber trees. The nutrients accumulated in the biomass of extraordinarily tall timber trees for a century or more were lost to the system when the trees were felled. The nutrient cycle was broken and the nutrient content of the ecosystem was drained out and depleted. Savur’s study further shows that the ‘enlightened’ self-interest of the British ‘foresters’ towards reviving timber and other plantations on hill slopes was the second grievous onslaught. The very same factors – heat, rain and elevation – turned negative when large forest areas were cleared or when the canopy was opened. The fierce tropical sun burnt the shade – and moisture-loving species as well as the micro-organisms in the soil. Rainfall, particularly concentrated in the monsoon season, often resulted in the soil and the humus-leaching out, with no root system left behind to protect and hold them back.
Exploitable areas were taken advantage of to the hilt and only unapproachable areas were left untouched. Savur points out that during British rule, German experts were called in to train British foresters and other staff to deal with the complex tropical forests. The Germans themselves struggled to understand the complexity as their expertise with forests under much simpler temperate climates was of little worth and quite irrelevant to India. There are several such examples in Savur’s study providing an insight into the policies that led to the denudation of the Indian tropical forests.
Savur underlines the fact that the white man was much too arrogant to learn from local population whose empirical knowledge of felling had been perfected through centuries of trial and error and preserved through folklore. The colonial foresters failed to notice that the early methods of acquisition of knowledge were the same as those of modern science. Also slash-and-burn agriculture had not destroyed the forests. Soon compelled to cope with social reality, the British administrators realised that traditional methods were not harmful and recorded their observations accordingly. Nevertheless, the forest dwellers were declared ignorant destroyers of foresters by the government. This occurred when they resisted interlopers’ attempts to ‘enclose’ their homelands as Reserve Forests, reserved for timber exclusively for colonial, military and commercial purposes. The colonial foresters devised their own rules for felling trees.
Savur’s critical analysis makes it clear that since the transfer of power, the Indian government and a sizeable section of its foresters have continued to echo the above-mentioned alien anti-people sentiment. Savur opines that they “fail to see that the people-forest ratio declined only with enclosures. The Planning Commission through its Five-Year Plans offered no alternate space, no alternate methods for the development of forest dwellers.” Savur goes on to conclude that, “This is a tragic but inevitable result of the fact that the state is pressurised by one of the most powerful sections of the ruling classes which needs forests for its own growth and because of which it cannot tolerate even the original inhabitants.” How this class acquired so much of power is covered in an objective and thorough manner by Savur and this fact shows the need to make Savur’s scholarly work reach all cross-sections of people in the country.
Savur’s study examines the specific question of the impact of the pulp and paper industry on the bamboo forests in India. In fact, the study started with the assumption that production of cultural paper and newsprint are essential for a rounded development of India.
Bamboos are an under-story, and bamboo forests are secondary forests due to anthropogenic interference but nevertheless an outgrowth which protects the ecosystem. The British foresters put it down to slash-and-burn, but clearing forests for plantations and opening out the canopy have had identical effects. The British foresters were annoyed with the proliferation of bamboo but later used it as a raw material for papermaking.
Savur explains that by the seventies, non-browsable but palpable eucalyptus was planted as fuel, fodder and food species in common village lands and wherever space was available, and christened ‘Social Forestry’. The state progressively turned anti-social, this time under the advice of an international body, the forestry wing of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, and was actively supported by other international agencies such as the World Bank, USAID, SIDA, etc. Even earlier, negative processes had been set in motion and, either deliberately or slavishly, the 1952 Forest Act followed the British Act of 1894.
Savur dwells considerably on the question – why the FAO and, to some extent, the World Bank are deeply involved in both forestry plantations and with India’s pulp and paper industry? “Viewed ideologically,” Savur answers, “their agenda is much broader, viz., post-war reconstruction under the leadership of the USA.” The World Bank works in tandem with the FAO by providing loans for social and form forestry with pulp wood species.
Savur observes that it may not be out of place to mention that the US did not have sufficient raw material for its pulp and paper industry. The two-pronged strategy of the FAO was to find raw material for the paper industry and to start pulp and paper industry in countries that did not have unlimited foreign exchange to buy paper, the demand for which was rising.
Did FAO take its mandate to identify pulpable species of tropical hard wood and produce adequate quantities of it overzealously? Did the Indian PPI in anticipation of the new raw material become careless with bamboo felling and destroy the forests? These are the questions that came to the fore, as Savur’s research proceeded.
The main question raised by Savur is: why did FAO think in terms of eucalyptus as early as 1952 when it was impressed with the excellent pulpable qualities of bamboo?
Savur underlines the fact that one of the 35-member team of FAO to Australia in 1952, Sukam Thirawat, expressed very serious doubts about the regenerative power of eucalyptus species in Asia. In other words, Sukam Thirawat is stressing the importance of matching the species to the site, which is of course of fundamental importance that both FAO and the World Bank ignored. Even other experts gave several reasons why eucalyptus is bound to fail in India.
Savur gives details to show that the government of India accepted and incorporated the FAO expert suggestions in the Third Plan document and those suggestions are detrimental to Indian tropical forests. Among the suggestions, one of them is that in the long run, India would have to turn to eucalyptus plantations, a change in the raw material consumption of pulp and paper industry from predominantly bamboo to predominantly hardwood, viz., eucalyptus (Ch.3). Full assistance was given by the Centre to the state governments for this purpose; as a result 87,000 hectares of eucalyptus plantations were raised. This annoyed the state forest departments (Ch.4). Bamboos had been given away almost gratis to the pulp and paper industry, yielding no revenue. The only resource available for the state forest departments was the central government’s grant to raise eucalyptus (Ch.8). This shortsighted policy, which is like plastic surgery, did not repair but only further distorted the face of the Indian forests. The pace of distortion increased in the Fifth Plan. It recommended that two per cent of the potentially most productive forests be replaced with eucalyptus. The Planning Commission’s position was strengthened by the setting up of the National Commission of Agriculture which also recommended this plastic surgery. It was euphemistically termed as ‘dynamic forestry’. It was presumably based on the FAO sponsored ‘Indicative Plan’ drawn up by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1965.
On the question of the felling of bamboo and the flowering of bamboo, Savur has a hypothesis. Savur records, “The hypotheses that emerged in the course of our observation and as a result of our methodology is that flowering of bamboo is a defensive mechanism, a last ditch attempt by a species to survive through seeding and dispersal of the seed”. It is further recorded, “So too is the hypotheses as to why eucalyptus does not grow in India and why it is allelopathic to so many Indian flora and fauna, unlike in native Australia.”
In analysing the consequences that the growth of the forest based pulp and paper industry have had on the tropical forests in India, which are spread over nine states, Savur does not mince words:

• A powerful section of the Indian business class owns the pulp and paper industry and this class has enough clout to manipulate the state structure and is responsible for both denudation of bamboo forests and for imposition of untried exotics on a massive scale on the natural forests.
• The large industry continued to ravage the bamboo and almost wiped it off the face of Indian forests. Eucalyptus plantation officially introduced under the advice of the FAO is not in the interest of Indian forests, flora and fauna.
• Organisations like the FAO, the World Bank and such other international bodies are convenient tools to shape the global economy for the convenience of rich nations.

Manorama Savur makes important recommendations at the end of each chapter. These recommendations would help activists and planners equally. Though the emphasis is on forests, especially bamboo forests, the lucid and gripping narration by Savur on how the powerful business class manipulates the state structure is a constant reminder to us about where we stand in our constitutional democracy.
Today, when the preaching of free trade and global economy is the order of the day and the big business houses manipulate the state machinery and media with impunity, Manorama Savur’s study is indeed relevant.