All about India

Mismanagement and overuse of India's once abundant forests has resulted in desertification, contamination, and soil depletion throughout the subcontinent. The rapid population growth of India has caused the resulted in a strain on the land. As more people engage in agriculture, more plots of land would lose their fertility over time, causing the occurrence of shifting cultivations as well as cultivation on hill slopes. Concurrent with such increases in demand for land in the field of agriculture, timber harvesting and firewood collecting has taken a toll on the fertility of the land and availability of land for further development. Together with the growth of industries and increase in the number of factories especially in urban India, these factors cause the eventual leadup to deforestation as the answer to land constraints. This has serious repercussions for the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Indians that live off the land. In Rajasthan alone, it is approximated that nearly five million tribal people (as of 2004) rely on the collection of forest produce as their only source of income or nourishment. Without continual access to forest products such as fruit, honey, or firewood these communities experience debilitating hunger and are reduced to extreme poverty. Also, deforestation leads to the loss of wildlife habitats and biodiversity. This will again lead to poverty and the lack of food as rural areas, especially tribal societies, are extremely dependant on wildlife biodiversity.