Plantations and cultivated lands will also come under the purview of the Tamil Nadu Preservation of Private Forests Act, the Madras High Court has ruled. To preserve the trees from indiscriminate cutting by private individuals, the Act had been enacted. As per the Act, the private owners could not cut and remove timber without prior permission form the concerned authorities. Therefore, rubber plantations even if they were cultivated partly or wholly, had to be considered as forest for the purpose of declaration by district collector as forests, it said.