Trees and Forests

This theme's background reading was rewritten by Swechha in September 2026 for Indian classrooms and in plainer language. The forest figures are the Forest Survey of India's, from the India State of Forest Report 2023. Species, forests and examples were changed to ones a class in India can go and look at. Unsourced figures the manual carried — species counts, protected-area totals, timber projections — were removed rather than replaced.

1. BACKGROUND, CONTEXT & KNOWLEDGE:

Forests of India

Start with the tree the class already knows: the one outside the gate. Somebody planted it, or nobody did and it came up anyway. It drops leaves on the parked scooters, it is the only shade at the bus stop in May, and no child in the room has ever been asked a single question about it. This chapter starts there and works outwards — to the peepal at the crossing, the mango behind the house, the sal forest in a state most of the class has never seen.

The Forest Survey of India measures the country's trees from the sky and reports the result. In the India State of Forest Report 2023, forest cover was 21.76 per cent of India's land area. Add the trees that grow outside forests — orchards, roadside avenues, the neem in the school compound — and the figure reaches 25.17 per cent. Forest is not one thing here. It runs from Himalayan temperate forest down to dry zone scrub, and the report puts all of it under one word.

Now the part that gets reported badly. Between 2021 and 2023, India's forest cover rose by 156.41 square kilometres. Tree cover rose by 1,289.4 square kilometres. Both went up, so the headline writes itself. The headline is lazy. Almost all of that gain is tree cover — orchards, avenues, plantations, trees standing in fields — and not forest. Forest moved by a sliver. A class that can hold those two numbers apart has learned something real about how good news gets reported.

So what is the difference? A forest is a place with a floor. Soil built up over decades, fungus threaded through it, dead wood rotting into it, seedlings coming up in the shade of their parents, birds that will nest in nothing else. A row of planted saplings is trees. Leave it alone for decades and it may become a forest; it is not one yet. Both are worth having. They are not the same thing, and they cannot be swapped.

There is a reason the two figures drift apart. Forest cover is read off satellite images — what the canopy looks like from above. From above, a mango orchard, a rubber plantation and a patch of old sal forest can all read as green. The satellite is honest about what it sees; it simply cannot see the floor, and the floor is where a forest keeps most of its life. Ask the class: what would you have to walk into to tell those three apart? That question is the whole answer.

India sorts its forests into six big groups — moist tropical, dry tropical, montane subtropical, montane temperate, subalpine and alpine. The names are dull; what they describe is not. Rain and height do most of the work. Heavy rain on low ground gives thick evergreen forest. Little rain gives thorn and scrub. Climb high enough and the trees give up altogether.

The range is the point. Rainforest in Kerala. Alpine pasture in Ladakh. Thorn scrub in the Rajasthan desert. Evergreen forest across the North East. Mangroves standing in salt water in the Sundarbans. One country, one word — forest — stretched over all of it.

Rainforest

The wettest forests sit in the North East and in a strip down the Western Ghats. Rain through most of the year, warmth through all of it, and the result is layers — trees above trees, with orchids and ferns living on the branches of other plants and never touching the ground. These forests cool the air around them and hold their own water. They also hold elephants, and elephants need to move. A forest cut into pieces by a road or a plantation stops being one home and becomes several traps.

Tropical Rain Forests in India

These are the oldest forests in the country, and a good exercise is to list what came out of them and is now on the plate. Mango. Banana. Jackfruit. Black pepper. Cardamom. Coffee. Every one of them was a wild plant in a wet forest long before anybody farmed it. Ask a class where lunch comes from and most will say the shop. It is a longer answer than that.

Temperate Deciduous Forests

Deciduous means the tree drops its leaves and stands bare for a while. In India that happens in the dry months, not the cold ones — which is why the plains look skeletal in March and green in July, the reverse of what most textbook pictures show. Deciduous forest comes in two strengths, moist and dry, and you find it across most of the country apart from the west and north-west.

Moist deciduous runs along the lower slopes of the Siwaliks, from Jammu across to West Bengal. Sal and teak are the big names, with mango, bamboo and rosewood. Dry deciduous covers much of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu — sandalwood, khair, mahua, jackfruit, semal, arjun, sheesham. Read that list out slowly. Half of it turns up in a kitchen, a temple, a carpenter's shop or a school desk.

These are working forests as much as wild ones. People live in them, graze in them and cut from them, and they are where pressure shows first. The standard answer to a cleared forest is a plantation drive: one morning, one photograph, saplings in the ground by lunch. Ask the harder question in class. Who waters them in May? A sapling needs somebody's attention through several summers before it can look after itself. The drive is the easy part.

In cities the same argument has produced something better. Small dense plots — often called Miyawaki, after the Japanese botanist whose method they follow — native species packed close together on prepared soil, in the corner of a park, a factory yard or a school ground. They are not forests. They are gardens that behave a little like forests, on ground that had nothing living on it before, and that counts for a great deal. What would not count is calling one a forest and walking away.

1.5 Ten forests worth travelling for:

India's forests are not only a subject. They are places you can stand in, and a child who has stood in one argues about them differently for the rest of her life. If a trip is ever possible, these are the ones. Sundarbans, West Bengal

A mangrove forest growing in salt water where the Ganga meets the sea, shared with Bangladesh, and the only place where tigers swim between islands to hunt. The sundari tree gives it its name. Fishing cats, wild boar, macaques, mongoose and pangolin live there too. Twice a day the tide comes in and the floor of the forest disappears.

Gir forest, Gujarat — the last wild home of the Asiatic lion

Sacred Grove, Khasi Hills, Meghalaya

The Khasi Hills hold forests that no law ever protected. A rule did: take nothing out, bring nothing in. The Mawphlang sacred grove outside Shillong has been kept that way for generations, and it is thick with old trees, orchids and butterflies you will not find in the fields just beyond its edge. It is the clearest evidence in the country that protection is a social habit before it is a government order. Namdapha National Park, Arunachal Pradesh

Namdapha climbs from lowland rainforest to snow, so tiger, leopard, clouded leopard and snow leopard all have room in the same park. Red panda, hoolock gibbons, capped langurs and Assamese macaques live there, and so does the Namdapha flying squirrel, which has been found nowhere else on earth. Jim Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand

India's first national park, and still the one most people have heard of. Wild elephants, sloth bears, otters, langurs, peafowl, and several kinds of deer — chital, sambar, hog deer, barking deer. It is also where a great many Indian schoolchildren see a wild elephant for the first time. Bandipur National Park, Karnataka

Once the private hunting ground of the Maharajas of Mysore, now a tiger reserve with the Western Ghats standing behind it. Elephants, gaur, chital, antelope. The highway through it shuts at night so animals can cross, and the long argument about that closure is itself worth a classroom hour. Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, Tamil Nadu

Where the Western Ghats meet the Nilgiri Hills. The Todas, Kotas, Irulas, Kurumbas, Paniyas and others have lived in these hills far longer than the reserve has existed. A forest with people in it is the normal case in India, not the exception, and any lesson that treats forest and people as opposites is teaching the wrong country. Keibul Lamjao National Park, Manipur

Photograph Courtesy: ianare sevi/Wikimedia Commons

The only floating national park there is. Mats of matted vegetation called phumdi drift on Loktak lake, thick enough to walk on, and the park exists to save the sangai — the brow-antlered deer that lives on them and nowhere else. Vandalur Reserve forest

Photograph Courtesy: skperias/Creative Commons

A protected forest inside Chennai, with the zoo at its edge. Proof that a city can keep real forest rather than a lawn with trees standing on it. Kanha National Park

Sal and bamboo, and wide grassy maidans where the barasingha came back from the edge of extinction. Tiger, leopard, sloth bear, gaur, dhole. Kanha is also the forest that gave British author Rudyard Kipling The Jungle Book — worth telling a class, and worth telling them the next bit too. The book is a foreigner's imagination of an Indian forest. The real one is better.

2. Biology of a Tree

Every tree starts as a seed, and most seeds come to nothing. A banyan seed is smaller than this full stop. Give it the right ledge, enough water and nobody scraping it off, and it becomes the tree a whole village sits under. Germination runs in a fixed order: the seed takes in water and splits its coat, a root goes down into the soil, then the stem and leaves push up towards light. From that moment the seedling feeds itself. Grown a little, it is a sapling. Above ground we notice trunk, branches and leaves. Below ground is the root system, and a tree with nowhere for its roots to go will never reach the size it could.

A tree has three main parts, and each one has a job.

2.1 Crown: the branches, twigs and leaves. The branches hold the leaves up into the light, and light is what the tree eats with.

2.2 Trunk: the main stem. It carries the crown, and it moves food and water up and down the tree. The bark on the outside is armour and insulation — it stops the tree drying out, and it is why a ground fire can pass a thick-barked tree and kill the thin-barked one standing next to it.

2.3 Roots: an underground network, usually spreading at least as wide as the crown and often wider. They hold the tree up and take in water and nutrients. This is the part concrete kills. A tree tiled in tight to the trunk on a city footpath is being slowly starved, and nobody walking past will see it happen.

A forest is not a group of trees. It is a community — living things above and below the ground, and the non-living parts they run on: soil, water, light, air. Where a forest has been left alone long enough, the trees and shrubs sort themselves into layers, and every layer is somebody's address.

3. ABOVE GROUND

3.1 Super-canopy trees: a few trees push up above everything else and stand alone against the sky. Semal, the silk cotton, does this — bare and covered in red flowers in February, visible from a long way off. Eagles and vultures use these trees, because nothing hangs over them.

3.2 Canopy trees: the mature trees whose branches meet to form a continuous roof and shade everything below. 3.3 Cavity trees and snags: a cavity tree is a living or dead tree with a hole in it; a snag is a dead tree still standing. Both look useless and neither is. Hornbills, parakeets, barbets, owlets and bats all need a hole somebody else made. A forest tidied of its dead trees loses most of its birds.

3.4 Understorey trees: small trees growing under the canopy in weak light, so they grow slowly. Some are young canopy trees biding their time. Others will never be tall and do not need to be. When a big tree falls and light floods in, the ones that were waiting race up to fill the gap.

3.5 Shrubs and saplings: low woody plants in the shade and in the open patches — ber, karonda, the next generation of trees, and in a great many Indian forests a thicket of lantana that arrived from abroad and will not leave.

3.6 Ground cover: the carpet on the forest floor — mosses, ferns, seedlings, flowers, fungi. Look down. That is where most of a forest walk actually happens.

3.7 Decaying wood: a fallen tree has not finished working. Rotting, it feeds the soil and houses beetles, fungi, snakes and small mammals. Clearing it away is not cleaning up. It is demolishing a building.

3.8 Organic litter: the layer of fallen leaves and twigs. It rots down into soil, holds moisture through the dry months and shelters a great deal of small life. Sweeping leaves into a pile and burning them takes all of that and turns it into smoke.

4. BELOW GROUND

The part nobody photographs does the most work. Roots of every size run through the soil and tangle with each other. The soil is layered too: the top layer is mostly rotted leaf and wood, and that is where the fine feeding roots sit. Every year the forest drops leaves, twigs and branches onto the floor; every year they are broken down and become soil. A forest builds the ground it stands on. That is why a cleared forest does not simply grow back — the ground went with it.

5. FOREST SUCCESSION Succession is the slow change of a forest over time, as one community of living things gives way to another. Disturb a forest and change starts at once. New plants germinate in the opened ground, grow, set seed and fill it. As they get bigger they crowd and shade one another, conditions change, and a different set of plants takes over. Each stage prepares the ground for the next. The changes slow until the forest looks settled, and that stage is called the climax. It is not an ending. A climax forest is still changing, only quietly — and one fire, one road or one clearing can send the whole sequence back to the start.

There are two kinds: primary succession and secondary succession.

Primary succession starts on ground that never carried plants at all — bare rock, sand, fresh silt. It begins with soil-making. Lichens and mosses get onto the rock and break it down grain by grain, over a very long time, until there is enough soil to hold a seed. Only then does the sequence of plants begin.

Secondary succession happens where plants did grow and something removed them: fire, felling, clearing, a landslide. The soil is still there, and usually the seeds and roots are too, so it moves far faster. This is the one a class is most likely to see — an abandoned plot behind the school, taken first by grass and weeds, then by whatever shrubs the birds drop into it. Watch one for a few years and this whole section is happening in front of you.

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