Environmental Ethics

Author(s): S M Jain
Publisher: Prakrit Bharti Academy

Page 52

Rishabha an Agro - Forestry Icon :
In that era of fierce battles between Devas and Rakshasas there had been saner towering personalities who brought rapprochement between the two warring groups or cultures and civilisations. The first such towering personality was RISHABH who has been given incarnation status of VISHNU in Brahmanic and of first Tirthankara (Enlightened) in Shramanik Chronology. He introduced and advised Agro-forestry i.e. planting of rows of trees and cultivation of land intermittently. The trees were so planted in the direction that their shade did not affect the agricultural crops in between. This has been substantiated by recent detailed research of Harappan and Sindhu culture. This practice of Agro-forestry now called “Taungya system' in forestry was adopted in India during world war-II when the then British rulers extracted more timber from forests than prescribed in working plans. To compensate the excess fellings compensatory plantations were raised by adopting agro-forestry and excellent plantations were raised free of cost e.g. teak plantations of Gorakhpur in UP. The methodology was to allot degraded forest lands to landless people, supply them seedlings of trees to plant at 15' spacing and in between allowed them to grow their agriculture crops and when trees grew taller and started shading agriculture crops, these people were shifted to other areas to practice agro-forestry. This practice continued till late fifties in India but had to be stopped by forest department because of malicious designs of so called leaders who instigated the people engaged in agro-forestry to claim permanent tenancy rights in such lands under tenancy acts and rules. It is worth mentioning here that plantations now being raised at the cost of several hundreds crores of rupees are not as successful as those from the above agro-forestry which were free of cost. The author has on assignment from Government of India evaluated till date tree planting and afforestation activities in 32 projects in various states and have concluded on the basis of recorded facts that 90% of
37