Van Sangyan: TFRI Jabalpur's Open-Access Monthly E-Magazine on Forestry
Van Sangyan is a monthly open-access e-magazine published by the Tropical Forest Research Institute (TFRI) in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, one of the regional institutes of the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) under India's Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. Carrying ISSN 2395-468X, the magazine has appeared monthly since 2014, reaching Volume 13 with its January 2026 issue, and exists to move forestry knowledge out of research journals and laboratories and into the hands of forest officers, field staff, students, farmers, tribal communities and interested citizens. Its name, drawn from the Hindi for forest knowledge, signals that purpose directly.
Unlike a commercial magazine, Van Sangyan is free to read, published as a downloadable PDF through the ICFRE and TFRI websites, and written largely by scientists and practitioners for readers who work with forests rather than merely study them. Each issue mixes short research and extension articles, practical notes, answers to readers' queries and reports of institute activity, in English and in Indian languages.
The Publisher: Tropical Forest Research Institute, Jabalpur
TFRI came into existence in April 1988, although its origin goes back to 1973, when a Regional Centre of the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, was established at Jabalpur to provide research support for forest management problems in central India. It is one of the nine regional institutes under ICFRE and functions as a major nucleus for research on forestry and ecology problems of the tropical forests of central India, principally Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, with Odisha also within its remit in some accounts.
The institute's campus lies about 10 kilometres south-east of Jabalpur on Mandla Road, spread over 109 hectares, with laboratory and office buildings, a library and information building, a biotechnology laboratory, residential facilities, a scholars' transit hostel and a scientists' hostel. TFRI is headed by a Director and has a staff strength recorded at 113, including scientists and officers, and it maintains a satellite centre, the Forest Research Centre for Skill Development at Chhindwara. Van Sangyan is produced from this campus, with its editorial office addressed at the institute's postal address, PO RFRC, Mandla Road, Jabalpur 482021.
A Monthly E-Magazine Built for Extension
Van Sangyan describes itself plainly as a monthly open access e-magazine, and its design follows the extension logic of its publisher. TFRI's mandate includes taking research to users, and its divisions cover agroforestry, biodiversity and sustainable management, tropical forest ecology and rehabilitation, forest entomology, forest pathology, genetics and plant propagation, non-wood forest produce, silviculture and joint forest management, and extension itself. The magazine gives each of those specialisms a popular outlet.
Indexing information printed in the magazine lists it with international indexing services, and its issues are archived on ICFRE servers year by year, so that a field officer searching for a note on a species, a pest or a nursery technique can retrieve a specific monthly issue years later. Volume numbering confirms the rhythm: Volume 4 in 2017, Volume 7 in 2020, Volume 12 in 2025 and Volume 13 in 2026, twelve issues a year without interruption.
Editorial Board and How It Is Made
Recent issues list an editorial board headed by the TFRI Director as patron, with the Group Coordinator (Research) as co-patron, a chief editor, an editor and coordinator, and an assistant editor drawn from the institute's scientists. In the January 2026 issue the chief editor is Dr. Naseer Mohammad, the editor and coordinator is M. Rajkumar and the assistant editor is Dr. Rajesh Kumar Mishra, roles that earlier volumes show rotating among TFRI scientists, with Dr. H. S. Ginwal among the directors who have served as patron. This scientist-edited model means the magazine is refereed informally by subject specialists inside the institute rather than by a commercial editorial staff.
The magazine openly invites contributions. Its note to authors welcomes readers to write about their views and issues in forestry and to share knowledge and experience, by email to the magazine's TFRI address or by post to the editor at Jabalpur. Articles may be submitted in English, Hindi, Marathi, Chhattisgarhi and Oriya, and must carry the writer's name, designation and full postal address with email and contact number. That multilingual invitation is unusual among Indian scientific periodicals and is central to the magazine's character.
Content: From Lichens to Livelihoods
The range of Van Sangyan's content can be seen in its back issues. Scientific notes explain, for example, how lichens contribute to soil formation, breaking down rock by pressure and chemical action and providing winter forage in northern latitudes, supported by full scholarly references to lichen handbooks and biology texts. Other articles document field observations in central Indian forests, such as studies of the edible earthstar fungus Astraeus hygrometricus collected by tribal people in the sal forests of Dindori district, Madhya Pradesh, sold in local markets and examined microscopically by TFRI researchers, with detailed discussion of its distribution across tropical and temperate regions.
Alongside such research writing sit practical and institutional pieces: editorials from the editor's desk, notes on nurseries strengthening tropical native species, reports of training and awareness programmes, and coverage drawn from TFRI's thrust areas of biodiversity assessment and conservation, sustainable forest management, planting stock improvement, climate change, environmental amelioration, forest products development, biofuels from forests, agroforestry models and forest protection. Cover photographs, such as the panoramic view of the Achanakmar-Amarkantak Biosphere Reserve credited to TFRI scientists, anchor each issue in the landscapes the institute studies.
Ask the Experts: The Query Feature
One of Van Sangyan's most distinctive features is its standing invitation for readers' questions. The magazine notes that TFRI houses experts from all fields of forestry who are happy to answer readers' queries on scientific issues; questions sent to the editor are answered by the relevant expert and the reply is published in the next issue. This turns the magazine into a two-way extension channel rather than a one-way bulletin, and it gives forest guards, nursery growers, farmers and students a documented route to institute scientists.
The feature fits the wider extension culture of ICFRE institutes, which run training programmes for stakeholders, non-governmental organisations, research organisations and the public. In print form, the answered query also becomes a permanent reference for every other reader facing the same problem, whether it concerns a tree disease, a seed source or a planting technique.
Language, Access and Readership
Van Sangyan's decision to accept and publish material in English, Hindi, Marathi, Chhattisgarhi and Oriya reflects the linguistic reality of its central Indian forest belt. Much of the practical knowledge the magazine carries, about non-wood forest produce, joint forest management or agroforestry, is most useful to readers who do not work primarily in English. Publishing in regional languages, under a Hindi title, is therefore an editorial policy with practical consequences, not a symbolic gesture.
Access is open and free. Issues are posted as PDFs on the TFRI and ICFRE websites, listed alongside the institute's other periodical, the Indian Journal of Tropical Biodiversity, and no subscription or registration wall stands between a reader and an issue. The likely readership is correspondingly broad and professional at once: state forest department staff in the mandated states, ICFRE scientists, university and college teachers and students of forestry and ecology, non-wood forest produce collectors and traders, and members of joint forest management committees.
TFRI's Research World Reflected in the Magazine
Reading Van Sangyan across a year gives a compact picture of TFRI's research mandate. The institute works on eco-restoration of the Vindhyan, Satpura and Maikal hills and the Western Ghats, rehabilitation of mined areas, agroforestry models, forest protection, identification of seed production areas and plus trees, establishment of seed orchards and production of quality planting material, provenance trials of species such as teak, bamboo, neem and sissoo, and research on biofertilisers and biopesticides. Articles arising from that work, written in accessible form, are the magazine's staple.
This distinguishes Van Sangyan from a peer-reviewed journal. TFRI's formal research appears in scientific journals; Van Sangyan is where the same institute explains, illustrates and applies its findings, celebrates its field sites and reports its training and outreach. For historians of Indian forestry institutions, its unbroken monthly run since 2014 also forms a dated record of what a major central Indian institute thought worth communicating, month by month.
Design and Identity
Each issue follows a recognisable template: the title in Devanagari and English, the open-access e-magazine description, indexing information, the ICFRE and ministry identification, the editorial board, the note to authors and the query invitation, followed by the month's articles with photographs and references. The consistency is institutional rather than commercial; there is no advertising-driven redesign cycle, and the magazine's identity rests on the TFRI and ICFRE names, its ISSN and its archive.
That plainness is also its credibility. A reader downloading an issue from an official icfre.org address knows exactly who stands behind the advice in it, which matters when the content concerns plant protection, edible forest produce or planting decisions that affect livelihoods.
Van Sangyan Today
Van Sangyan continues in monthly publication, with Volume 13 opening in January 2026 under the same editorial model, from the same Jabalpur campus, and with the same open invitation to contributors in five languages. In an Indian publishing landscape where forestry communication is split between dense research journals and general environmental journalism, it occupies a useful middle ground: scientist-edited, free, multilingual and practice-oriented. For anyone wanting to understand what central India's tropical forest research establishment actually does, and how it speaks to the people who manage and live from those forests, Van Sangyan is the most direct monthly window available.
