Abstract
An exercise undertaken in this article has unravelled the status of forest offences in Himachal Pradesh from 1965-66 to 2009-10. It brought out that a total of 10,39,172 no. of forest offences (average 23093 annually) were taken cognizance of in the State from 1965-66 to 2009-10. The highest no.of offences ( 43901 no.) were detected in 1975-76 and the lowest (11869 no.) in the year 2006-07. Illegal felling & grazing related offences together constituted nearly 57%, forest fire related offences were less than 2% whereas the miscellaneous offences were nearly 40% of the total. The period from 1971 to 1985 experienced sharp increase in the number. of forest offences, though the offences taken cognizance of were disposed off quite efficiently. The rate of disposal ranged from 71.88% to 80.13% during various time periods from 1965-66 to 2009-10 with overall disposal rate of 77.52 % Of the total no. of offences disposed off 9.3% of the cases were taken to Courts/ authorised officers and 78.4%. were disposed off by way of compounding, 13.23% remained untraced/filed. Periodic trend (5 year blocks i.e. P1 to P9) revealed 50% decline in forest offences during P-9 (2005-2009) compared to what existed during P-1(1966-70). Ironically the downturn was despite tremendous increase in human and domestic animal population in the State during same time. The success rate of the offences decided by Courts/ Authorised officers ranged from 76.92% during-P-1(1965-69) to 98.9% during P-9(2005-09) as per data published by State Forest Department. On the other hand, cases registered with Police from 1988 to 2015 secured conviction rate of 12.99%.
Keywords
Forest Offence, Annual Administrative Report (AAR), Illicit felling, Grazing, Compounding, Himachal Pradesh, Indian Forest Act