SINHAS Vol 28 No 2 Avash Bhandari

Selling Railway Sleepers: “Efficient Exploitation” of Tarai Forests after the First World War

Abstract
During the First World War, the state of sleepers supply to the British Indian Railway Companies became critical. In this context, the Railway Board of India approached the Nepal government expressing interest in the extraction of sleepers from the sal forests in the Sarda Valley. Nepal had already been exporting and selling logs and sleepers to British Indian railway companies and gun carriage factories since the late 19th century and the outturn had started to go up in the first decade of the 20th century. However, officials of the Imperial Forest Service were not directly involved in the extraction of forest resources in Nepal until 1918. Using archival materials related to sleeper extraction and export from the Tarai forests in the 1920s and later, this study shows how forests emerged as key a site of Nepal’s incorporation into the regional economic processes under the aegis of British imperialism and capital. I focus on the extraction, management, and marketing of sleepers under the supervision of experts from British India who were trained in the science of forestry and contextualize the origin of “scientific forest management” in Nepal. 

Keywords: forests, sleepers, Tarai, extraction, forestry, railways