Dr. Hugh Cleghorn

Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn (1820 – 17 May 1895, Stravithie, Fife) was a pioneering Scottish physician, botanist and forester who worked in India. He is known as "the father of scientific forestry, in India."

He was born at Madras in 1820, and educated at University of Edinburgh and University of St Andrews. He became an MD in 1841 and first served in India in 1842 at the Madras General Hospital. Cleghorn returned to India in 1852 and was appointed Professor of Botany and Materia Medica in the Madras Medical College. He also became the Honorary Secretary of the Madras Agri-Horticultural Society.

[edit] Madras Forestry Department

Dr. Cleghorn was interested in economic botany became involved with forest conservation in Mysore in 1847. After returning to Britain in 1848 on sick leave, he gave several speeches about the failure of agriculture in India. These lectures spurred the Government of India to introduce forest conservation policies and Forest Departments in India and other colonies as well. He took part in cataloguing the raw-products shown in the Great Exhibition in 1851. In 1855 Dr. Cleghorn was asked to organise the Madras Forest Department and started systematic forest conservancy. In 1856 he was appointed Conservator of Forests in Madras Presidency.

His persistent campaigning with the Government resulted in the banning of shifting cultivation in the Madras Presidency in 1860. The ban was ordered while he was again on sick leave in Britain. He returned to Madras in 1861 with cinchona plants from Kew Gardens. The cinchona plantations around Ooty thrived and were seen as a possible substitute in blight-hit coffee estates, but when world prices of cinchona crashed, tea was seen as a better investment.^[1]

[edit] Forests and gardens of South India

Foot of the Poonachy Pass, from Forests and gardens of South India

In 1861, the book: The forests and gardens of South India, by Hugh Cleghorn and illustrated by Douglas Hamilton, was prepared at the request of Government, principally for the purpose of furnishing a continuous view of forest conservancy in the Madras Presidency during the four years that the department was in operation. One of his goals was to supply a manual to enable the forest assistants in positions of responsibility to act intelligently with good results to the State.^[2]

[edit] Forest Department of India

Cleghorn organised the new Forestry Department in Madras with such astonishing energy and success that in 1861 he was called on to advise Sir Robert Montgomery and extend the sphere of his operations into the Punjab. He was on special duty with the Government of India about the years 1860-62, when he investigated forest matters in the North-Western Himalayas and elsewhere. He also afforded Mr. Sir Dietrich Brandis, C.I.E., the most efficient assistance in introducing and systematically working conservancy in the forests of Bengal, and with the most satisfactory results. His work led to the establishment of the Forest Department of India.^[3] With Sir Dietrich Brandis, he was the first Commissioner for the Conservancy of Forests. In 1864 was appointed Inspector-General of Forests. He left India in 1869, was elected president of the Scottish Arboricultural Society in 1872, and subsequently played an instrumental role in the establishment of a lectureship in Forestry in Edinburgh University.^[4][5]

[edit] References