On March 17, 2016, the first timber mill in the state of Madhya Pradesh, where the state is situated, started making its rounds in the city of Pune.
It was a bit of a surprise to me that the project was going to start in the capital, but I guess I expected it.
It seemed like a good start.
But I soon realised that this was just a small part of the big picture.
The project was a huge undertaking, with the aim of making the state a timber-rich one, a task that had been long-promised.
The timber mills in the Pune area have been in operation for almost 50 years, but for decades, Madhya India had not produced enough timber to satisfy demand for its export.
In 2009, the state’s forest department announced a plan to convert about 1.3 million hectares of forest to cropland by 2020.
The scheme, dubbed ‘The Bijli Forest Initiative’, was hailed as the biggest timber project in the world.
And with the help of private investors, it was expected to yield huge returns for the state, which was already the world’s third-largest producer of timber after China and the United States.
The government had invested around Rs 40,000 crore ($5.6 billion) to create more than 1.6 million hectares for this purpose.
To be clear, this wasn’t all.
It also created a lot more jobs.
More than 30,000 jobs were created, mostly in the construction sector, with some 5,000 people working in the timber mills.
The projects also produced a lot for the environment, with 1.8 million tonnes of timber produced annually, and a huge amount of waste that was disposed of as pulp.
So, when I started reading about the project in 2010, it sounded very ambitious.
But it turned out that the plan was so ambitious, and the projects were so risky, that even I was skeptical about its long-term success.
The plan was to convert the forest, which is around 1,400 square kilometres, to croppable forest by 2020, by cutting down the trees, clearing the ground and planting bamboo to make it a new forest.
It looked like a simple and straightforward idea, but it quickly got in the way.
The Bikasan project in Andhra Pradesh (AAP) has been on a mission to convert forests to cropeable ones since the late 1990s.
The trees were planted in a special forest in Pune, but due to lack of suitable land, they were chopped down.
They were then harvested, but not till the timber mill was completed in 2007.
This, according to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, was a violation of the Bikasi (Bamboo Project) Ordinance, and hence the project went on a wild goose chase for decades.
The forest was given to a forest bank, which had no responsibility for it.
At the end of 2015, when the government finally decided to convert 1,300 hectares to cropping, it allotted Rs 5,700 crore to the bank to acquire the land.
But after that, the bank gave up its role and handed over the forest to the timber industry.
In a nutshell, the Bikkasan forest was handed over to the logging companies, who took the money and sold it to the government, who then sold the forest back to the forest bank.
The process of converting forests to a cropping system has become a costly, time-consuming and complicated one.
For instance, the government has to pay the farmers for their labour, as well as the forest owners.
The Bikasisan project, by contrast, had to be done without any government involvement.
It is a process of conversion, which can be done with a forest manager.
The farmer has to buy the land and start cultivating it.
The bank has to purchase the trees and the land itself.
For the timber workers, it is not much of a challenge.
They have to get the land in a very short time, and then they have to work in the forest.
And in the case of the logging, the process is different.
It involves harvesting the trees first, and after the forest is cleared, they have a big task to clear the land to make way for new trees.
This is what the forest manager does, but he has to be very careful to protect the forests against the onslaught of predators.
And the cost of this job has become prohibitively expensive for the workers.
The problem with this conversion is that it is very difficult to implement in the long term.
In a state that has the second-highest number of suicides in the country, and which has a large number of people in poverty, the issue of suicides and economic hardship is a major concern for the people in Madhya.
The State government has also taken the issue up with the Chief Minister of