FORESTS AND FOREST POLICY IN INDIA 45 In the light of the devastating impact of deforestation, this paper seeks to inquire into the causes of the rapid deforestation in India, and to examine how and to what extent the social forestry programme initiated by the government from 1974-75 seeks to undo the ill-effects of deforestation. Both the government and UN agencies, including the FAO, agree that deforestation in the Third World is caused by population explosion, especially so in India which is one of the most populated countries in the world. The theory of the existing contradiction between the inhabitants of the forest regions—mostly tribals—• and the forests, propounded by the British imperialists, has been accepted by both the agencies. According to the Draft Sixth Five Year Plan, the purpose of extending the social forestry programme to tribals would thus be to convert the tribal economy based on the destructive use of trees, to a system in which tribals begin to take care of the trees.8 This approach has been further magnified in papers read and published by some of the top bureaucrats of the forest department. The most glaring example of unanimity of opinion on this issue is provided by the papers read by different forest department officials in a series of seminars organised by the Himalaya Seva Sangh in Shillong, Dehra Dun and New Delhi during 1976-77.9 According to the FAO report: There are now perhaps, 200 million people living in the tropical forest areas and practising 'slash and burn farming' (shifting agriculture) on perhaps 300 million hectares (ha.) of forest lands in order to provide their daily food. In parts of South and Southeast Asia this form of land use occupies some 30 per cent of the officially designated forest area. The traditional systems of shifting agriculture, which employed a lengthy fallow period under forests to restore the fertility of soil, which weie capable of supporting agricultural crops for only a limited number of years, have largely broken down. Growing population pressures, and migration in the forest areas by landless people from elsewhere, have forced a progressive shortening of the fallow period to the point where it suffices neither to restore soil fertility nor recreate an usable forest crop.10 On the other hand, B K Roy Barman, in his paper read at the aforementioned seminar in Shillong, while acknowledging that shifting cultivation causes soil erosion, concluded on the basis of his empirical studies that "commercial exploitation of forests and utilisation of forest products for the supply of fuel-wood, housing material and grazing, caused soil erosion to a much greater extent". Dilating on shifting cultivation, he said that there were four or five techniques of