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Abstract
In all societies, forests have been offering significant support to the rural life world over. Across all cultures, forests provide food, fuel, fodder, timber, and herbal medicines among others. Nonetheless, with pressure from ever expanding human population to produce enough foodvis-à-vis forest resource as source of foreign exchange, forests in India experienced rapid depletion throughout the colonial time and after independence up to the mid-1980s. In 1970s the Government of India (GoI) decided to involve rural communities in forestry developmentto create employment for communities while conserving forest resources to meet their needs. This did not solve the problem of forest degradation completely. By 1997, only 19.27 percent of India’s total land area had forests and trees.