An army of men from a nomadic tribe who have made the national park home hack at trees with axes within walking distance of the people hired to guard them in a bid to get fuel for cooking and money from selling the timber.

"It's very difficult to stop them because they are dependent on the forest and besides we have orders from the National Human Rights Commission to provide them grazing rights until their relocation," park director G.S. Pande says.

"In the process, they also lop trees," says Pande, who has 150 guards to patrol the 700-square kilometre (270-square mile) park nestled in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, mostly on foot.

The scene shows how hard it is for India to meet a national goal of increasing forest cover to 33 percent from an official 20.5 percent.

The true forest cover may only be half of the official figure, says Bivash Pandav, a scientist with the national Wildlife Institute of India based in the Himalayan foothill town of Dehradun.

India's more than 638,000 villages are growing along with the country's economy and population, putting humans in competition for scarce resources in sanctuaries reserved for trees and wildlife from tigers to deer.

Humans are winning the struggle easily, Pandav says.

"The myth that these people can co-exist with forests is wrong," Pandav says. The number of nomadic families that have settled in the Rajaji park has grown from a few dozen a few decades ago to 1,390 families, or about 14,000 people, now.

The majority of India's billion-plus population live outside cities and have little access to electricity, clean water and employment in the country with the largest number of poor on earth. Many people resort to stripping supplies from wherever they are available.

The Congress Party-led coalition government which came to power in May 2004 has made improving the lot of India's rural population a priority. But many government officials that oversee the programs to help the rural poor say the problems are overwhelming and hesitate to favor the environment over people.

"They don't have microwaves like you city slickers but they too must cook," says a sentry watching the illegal lopping at the dumbbell-shaped Rajaji park where deer, elephants, tigers, leopards and bears claw for space with the settlers.

Rajaji is one of India's 90 state-protected national parks and 502 wildlife sanctuaries spread over 156,933 square kilometres (60,592 square miles) that are being destroyed by encroachment and grazing from cattle, experts say.

"Extraction of fuel wood is the most critical issue because then the regeneration of forests becomes very poor," says Forest Survey of India joint director Saibal Dasgupta, who is tasked with mapping the country's green cover.

He notes India, whose Hindu majority reveres the cow, has 17 percent of the world's 1.3 billion cattle population.

The tree cutting for food and pasture land has turned 7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) of forests bald and prone to flooding, Dasgupta says.

"We must act quickly with a pragmatic approach to halt this," he says, referring to India's target of increasing green cover to 33 percent of its land mass which some policy-makers as well as national experts say is an impossible task.

The need for increasing forest cover takes on added urgency because it can minimize global warming trends that are already accelerating a retreat in Himalayan glaciers, he says. The thawing could trigger a massive water crisis in the coming decades.

To combat the trend, the Forest Research Institute is taking a census of forest areas in the country and hope to be able to come up with a triage plan to save the most valuable spots, says the institute's director K.K. Chowdhury.

"We do not have the budgetary support nor the space to meet the 33-percent target because so much is under encroachment and also forests have vanished wherever mining activity is on. It is atrocious," he says.

India's funds-starved Ministry of Environment and Forests gets less than one percent of the national budget despite frequent reports that forest cover is disappearing at a break-neck pace.

Rajaji park chief Pande, who is also trying to boot out a defence ministry arms dump from the heart of the sanctuary, says the forests can bounce back once human occupation is ended.

"We just relocated 734 families from two of our nine ranges and the forests there are bouncing back and if this experiment can succeed here then it can be enforced in other parks of India which are under occupation of encroachers," he says.

"The wildlife too has reclaimed their homes," he says of the park's 469 elephants, 208 leopards, 30 tigers and uncounted number of reptiles, bears, porcupines, civets, deer and antelopes fighting to survive under Rajaji's thinning tree cover.

"The removal of human habitats is my first priority. We owe it to nature," Pande says, adding that an ecological collapse in Rajaji could spell disaster for the adjacent Jim Corbett National Park, the 70-year-old mascot of India's conservation efforts.

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