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India’s vanishing Sandalwood: How Veerappan and the state strangled a fragrant heritage
Once India’s pride, sandalwood now withers under decades of state control, smuggling, and policy failure, leaving Australia to own its legacy.
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R Suryamurthy - Sat, 18, Oct 2025
- 16:04 EDT
- 24
Sandalwood plant / Courtesy: Wikipedia
There were two bandits in India’s sandalwood story. One carried a rifle in the forests of Sathyamangalam. The other wielded red tape in the corridors of power. Veerappan may have smuggled sandalwood out by the truckload, but the real looter was the system that turned the world’s most prized tree into a bureaucratic hostage.
A new Sandalwood Development Committee Report by Niti Aayog has laid bare what every forester already knew and every policymaker ignored: India’s sacred tree has been bled dry not by smugglers alone, but by the state’s own suffocating embrace.
The document is an autopsy of a tragedy decades in the making—a tale of ecological neglect, regulatory arrogance, and environmental amnesia. The species that once perfumed empires has been reduced to a ghost of its former glory.
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