Social Forestry Improves Comprehensive Development of Forestry and Rural Economy in India

Since 1973, the great successes have been made in Indian social forestry. The successful experiences in developing social forestry havedrawn great attention of many countries, and social forestry has beenregarded as a model for developing countries to develop their forestry.India has accumulated rich experiences in its social forestry in nearly fortyyears, the important experiences are: a) The Government attaches greatimportance to social forestry. Social forestry not only is one of the maintasks in Indian forestry development programme, but also has become animportant part in master plan in national economic development in India.Social forestry will be implemented in the future in India. b) All level offorestry sectors have set up agencies for managing and implementing socialforestry, c) India combines social forestry with direct economic benefit offarmers closely. The selection of multi-purpose and fast growing species,mixed planting with varied species and intensive management of plantationwith high input aim at immediate benefit. It is the recent benefit thatmakes social forestry draw great attraction of farmers who have benefitmuch from social forestry, d) India pays great attention to introducingforeign financial aid. As India has good environment for investment, Indiansocial forestry has been subsidized about four billion US dollars by someinternational aid agencies at the end of the Seven-Year Plan. Chinahas made great progresses in plain forestry and wasteland afforestation,but most of the planted trees are timber-using species, so that it islater for farmers to gain economic benefit because of longer rotation.Using the Indian experience fof reference, China should plant multipurposespecies with short-rotation in traditional four-side plantation and plainforestry, in this way, farmers will get much benefit earlier, so that theinitiatives of farmers in planting trees can be aroused.