Paragraph on the Major Forest Products of India

Here is your paragraph on the major forest products of India!

Major forest products consist of timber, smallwood and fuelwood including charcoal.

Indian forests produce about 5,000 species of wood, of which about 450 are commercially valuable.

Both hard and soft woods are obtained from Indian forests. Hard woods include important species such as teak, mahogany, logwood, iron-wood, ebony, sal, greenheart, kikar, semal, etc.

These woods are used for furniture, wagons, tools, etc. Soft woods include deodar, poplar, pine, fir, cedar, balsam, etc. They are light, strong, fairly durable and easy to work and as such are very useful for cosntructional timbers.

They also provide useful raw materials for making paper pulp. It is interesting to note that 70 per cent of hard wood is burnt as fuel and only 30 per cent is used in industries while 70 per cent of the soft wood is used in industries and only 30 per cent is burnt as fuel.

Forests meet about 40 per cent of energy needs of the country including more than 80 per cent of the rural energy requirements. The current production of wood is about 52 million cubic metres out of which about 40 million cubic metres or nearly 77 per cent of total is used as fuel wood.

The current production of wood is too short of our present demand which is increasing at an alarming rate. It has been estimated that our annual fuel wood requirements by 2010 will be 350 million cubic metres. The increase in demand for industrial wood will be much more keeping in view the large scale industrialisation in the country.

The areal distribution of production of wood is very uneven in India. Jammu and Kashmir is the largest producer of timber wood where 1.65 lakh cubic metres of timber wood was produced in 1999- 2000. This was closely followed by Punjab (1.64 lakh cubic metres) and Madhya Pradesh (1.59 lakh cubic metres). The other major timber producing states ate Karnataka, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Arunachal Pradesh and Kerala. Andaman and Nicobar Islands also produce sufficient quantity of timber.

Like timber, fuelwood is also unevenly distributed in India. Karnataka with 12.9 lakh tones is the largest producer of fuelwood in India. Karnataka is followed by West Bengal (8.6 lakh tonnes), Maharashtra (7.5 lakh tonnes), Bihar (3.9 lakh tonnes), Rajasthan (3.8 lakh tonnes), Madhya Pradesh (3.3 lakh tonnes) and Andhra Pradesh (1.0 lakh tonnes).

Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Kerala, Manipur Mizoram and Gujarat also produce sufficient fuelwood. Assam, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Orissa, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh hold very insignificant position with respect to fuelwood production.