Unlike in the east, the Siwalik foothills in western Nepal soar over the tarai plains to nearly 3,000m. The altitude makes these slopes ideal for pine, and the mountains of northern Kailali are famous for their coniferous forests.

Unchecked felling and timber poaching is now endangering the forests. And with the forest cover gone, the Siwaliks, which are made of gravel, sand and soft conglomerate, are much more vulnerable to soil erosion during the monsoon.

Saw mills in the tarai are now carting down up to 50 lorries daily filled with pine logs from the stretch of mountains from Khanidanda in Kailali to Budar in Doti. Additionally, in the past month, local storms have felled 300 pine trees along the Dhangadi-Dadeldhura highway. Environmentalists are worried that at this rate of destruction, the famous pine forests of western Nepal may soon become extinct.

There are thousands of cubic metres of pine trunks piled up along the highway, ready to be loaded on to trucks. In the absence of security, there appears to be a free-for-all among timber contractors. Even if they have permits to fell trees, locals say, they often poach trees from neighbouring districts and protected community forests.

"The best thing that happened to these forests was the Nepal bandas and the blockades," said one Kailali villager, "at least the Shaktiman trucks couldn't ply for some weeks." But now, it looks like the timber contractors are making up for lost time, and the trucks are roaring up and down the highway to Kailali and Kanchanpur fully loaded with timber again.

"There is no police or army here, so they are quite free to do what they want," says another villager in Phaltunde village. "No one is stopping them." The Maoists aren't concerned about the denudation either, as they are happy enough collecting their 15 percent cut from the timber merchants for their revolutionary coffers.

Villagers in upper Kailali despair for their forests, saying that at the rate the trees are being cut, their VDCs will soon have no forests left. In Doti, the District Forest Officer, Biswanath Mahato, says the felling is being carried out with all the legal provisions: a tender notice in Gorkhapatra and strict limits on forests to be cleared for highway construction.

Mahato says permission has been granted this year to cut 8,000 cubic ft along the highway alignments, 70,000 cubic ft from community forests and 24,000 cubic ft of pine from other areas. The regional forestry director, Diwakar Pandey says the trees need to be culled for proper management to prevent trees from being destroyed by fires and storms with fire gaps and shelter belts. But Pandey admits that the glut in the timber market means prices have crashed and there aren't enough contractors willing to lift the logs.

When asked, villagers in Kailali doubted that only the stipulated amount of timber was being cut. "This season I earned quite a lot of money," admitted the driver of a Shaktiman truck during a tea stop along the highway. On condition that we not use his name, he continued: "If they are paying us so much, our bosses must be raking it in. They must be building houses in Kathmandu."

Another truck driver confided: "I am only doing this to support my family, but when I see our forests being destroyed, I feel really sad."