FORESTS.
The Peddapalli reserve lies opposite Yellamanchili on the low, narrow range of red hills which run from the southern extremity of the district to near Kasimkóta. The growth in this is not quite so wretched as in Vémagiri. There is no real timber,but the slopes of the hill are covered with coppice varying in density according to the aspect, the incidence of grazing and the extent to which the forest was formerly denuded by pódu cultivation. Old inhabitants remember seeing pódu all over this range in former days. The crop is thinnest on the outer slopes next the cultivation, and densest in the interior valleys.
The working-plan divides the reserve into two circles, east and west. In the former of these about half the area is to be closed to felling for 20 years, while the other half is to be treated on the system known as 'coppice with standards' to meet the local demand for small timber, sugar-cane props and fuel. The latter circle (excepting 550 acres) has been divided into eight annual coupes which are to be felled, on the same system, for the supply of fuel to the railway companies at Waltair and the markets along the coast, when the exploitable age of the growth reaches 20 years. This necessitates the closure of the circle to felling for twelve years in each rotation. The working-plan also provides for the regulation of grazing and protection from fire.
In Pálkonda the receipts from the forests, which lie chiefly on the Pálkonda hills, were included, up to 1886, in the lease of the taluk to Messrs. Arbuthnot & Co., and the Forest Act was only extended to the country in 1890. The inner valleys of the hills contain a good deal of sál (Shorea robusta) in patches, small but capable of improvement, and the outer slopes carry a scrub jungle full of seedlings of iron wood (Xylia dolabriformis),satinwood (Chloroxylon Sicietenia) and other good trees. But the whole area is so liable to fires and has been so ruined by long-continued pódu cultivation that there is little growth left, while reservation is restricted by the necessity of leaving the hill people a sufficient area on which to practise this pódu. The largest reserves are Barnakonda (13,517 acres), Kadagandi (11,064), Antikonda ('6,969) and Pálkonda (4,580). Of these, perhaps the least promising is the last, all of it having been felled at one time or another for pódu, and the northern slope being especially bad. Kadagandi, which includes a considerable belt on the plains, is probably the best of the reserves and is likely to increase in value.
For the areas in the Pálkonda Agency outside the tracts reserved under section 16 of the Forest Act, simple rules have
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