A mile of broad-gauge rail track alone required 1800 to 2000 sleepers. By 1878, over 2 million sleepers had been used for the construction of railway lines. The long-term interest in building an effective rail system led to a new regime of forest control that sought to rein in private extraction so as to secure raw materials for the railways, while also preventing the devastation that private contractors –both Indian and European– had caused in various parts of the country. Officials were anxious to prevent the felling of trees for the short-term profit of railway contractors and the realization that India’s forests were not inexhaustible had begun to settle in. Concerns over the timber supply for the railway project were the impetus for a colony-wide forest policy and led to the establishment of the Imperial Forest Department and the first comprehensive legislation in the form of the Forest Act of 1865. The appointment of Dietrich Brandis as the Inspector General of Forests in 1864 was also central to further developments. In this position, he examined and advised on the systems of forest management in various provinces and thus became the first official with such extensive powers on this issue. The crisis in the supply of timber for the railways led to the consolidation of existing initiatives for conservation under his leadership.
The Imperial Forest Department was formed in 1864 with the assistance of German foresters under the leadership of Brandis to ensure the protection and supply of teak, sal and deodar –the only Indian timbers strong enough to be utilized as railway sleepers– but the task of checking the earlier decades and the consolidation of the forest estate could not be accomplished without the assertion of state monopoly over forests. The Forest Act of 1865 was the first step towards a rule of property for the forests of British India, but the provisions of the act soon became a matter of fierce debate among officials. Some, like Sir Henry Maine, were adamant that the government had no intentions of abridging community rights and advocated for self-regulation by village communities. Others felt that total control over forests was needed to ensure steady supply of timber. Due to these disagreement among the officials, Brandis pushed for a middle ground and the act provided for only a limited degree of state intrusion and control. The government's right to woodlands under its control was not absolute. The key question now became how far state intervention ought to go and to what extent the rights of users ought to be curtailed. This debate became the foundational basis for the more comprehensive forest legislation of 1878.
The ideological premises and material interests of the Raj were closely connected to the provisions of the Act of 1878. The government's programs for preservation and calls for curtailment of forest rights were in conflict with the 'ancient privileges' of cultivators. Effective conservation required that the government determine which privileges would be retained, those of forest communities or those of the imperial state. The increasing commercial values of the forests gave the supporters of absolute control the upper hand, and in the Forest Act of 1878 there was a significant shift away from the rights of communities to the benefit of the British imperialists.
The Act of 1878 did not affect all of British India uniformly due to regional variations in its applicability as well as variations in categorization of forests and differences in the local system of land revenue. The provisions of the Act ensured that the state could demarcate ‘valuable’ tracts of forest needed especially for railway purposes and retain flexibility over the remainder of the forests to be able to revise its policy from time to time. Per the Act, all government forests were not alike as a distinction was made between ‘reserved’ and ‘protected’ forests. In reserved forests all rights were recorded and settled but in protected forests, user rights were not always set aside. Further, the division and ownership of wastelands depended on the nature of the land revenue system. In areas such Bengal and Banaras the landowners had claim to the wastelands whereas in most of the Madras Presidency, all wasteland other than the village grazing grounds was owned by the government. After the passage of the Forest Act of 1878, forests were often taken over by officials and were regarded as more than potential arable land. Unlike previous rulers who had cut down trees for strategic reasons or to increase their revenue, the British began to systematically protect forests to secure timber. They also tried to regulate the use of land by groups on the fringe of the settled arable. As Ramachandran Guha puts it, “[the British] established monopoly right over forests with a legal sleight of hand, which sought to establish that the customary use of forest by the villagers was not based on ‘right’ but on ‘privilege’ and that this ‘privilege’ was exercised only at the mercy of the local rulers. Since the British were now the rulers, the rights of absolute ownership were held to be vested in them.” The creation of an all-India Imperial Forest Service and the enactment of legislation marked another major change in the attitudes of the British towards the forests of the subcontinent. With this it became possible to exclude rural land users from forests entirely and promote the growth of commercially valuable species on a larger scale than ever before.