FORESTS.
and tree-growth cannot flourish: each rotation it is poorer and poorer till at last it disappears altogether.
I have nowhere in India seen this hill cultivation so systematically carried out. Directly all the forest within a certain radius has been felled and cultivated, the village is deserted and the cultivators move off to other tracts to carry on the same ruinous system. Numerous deserted villages may he seen all over the plateau; the site is almost always marked by a good many grand old tamarind, mango and champa trees, generally of about a hundred years' growth, and in most cases by a few tumbled down huts; these sites are probably always returned to periodically.
This description of pódu cultivation and its effects is strictly applicable to the state of things which still prevails to-day. Wherever one travels through Jeypore, one sees wide tracts of hill-side, which once were forest-clothed, now covered only with blackened stumps, leafless dead trees, bare ash-covered soil and protruding barren rock. Mr. Willock wrote in 1890 that 'the destruction going on in the sál country beyond Naurangpur at present is most lamentable. Wherever one goes one sees huge areas, hundreds of acres in extent, covered with the remains of fine forests, ringed a year or two back to afford a site for two or three seasons' mixed cultivation of ragi, millet, niger and weeds, but chiefly the latter.'
The jungles have also suffered to a less extent from other wasteful habits of the hill man. He will lop a Schleichera trijuga tree out of all shape to collect the lac off its branches; hack the boughs off a Terminalia Chebula to save himself trouble in gathering its fruit; ring or fell a full-grown sal tree for the sake of the few pies' worth of dammar which results; and cut down a 50-feet teak tree to get a little honey from its upper branches.
The result of years of these reckless methods is that to-day the 3,000 feet plateau contains no considerable area of heavy jungle anywhere north of the line of the Machéru river. Rapidly dwindling patches survive, but their expectation of life is short. The jungle on Damuku, the big hill behind the Pottangi travellers' bungalow, for instance, still holds sambhur, but it is highly probable that in twenty years it will have disappeared. Round Koraput and Nandapuram the country is already so bare that even firewood is scarce, and it is difficult to believe that the hills ever carried any jungle at all.
The level country in the neighbourhood of Jeypore town and the hills between Náráyanapatnam and Bissamkatak contain sparse forest, ruined by constant pódu cultivation, but no large
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