India, Aug. 3 -- Temporary government policies have a habit of outliving their deadlines. But few survive for 56 years. In February 1968, the Himachal Pradesh government froze the number of animals each herder could graze on the state's grasslands at the 1966-67 levels. It also set up a Grazing Advisory Committee to examine the "thorny problem" of balancing grazing with forest conservation, amid concerns that overgrazing was causing erosion and siltation that threatened reservoirs such as Bhakra. Two years later, the committee acknowledged that the permit limits had no scientific basis. Its 1970 report called for a scientific assessment of how many animals the state's forests and alpine pastures could sustainably support and recommended e...