I recently found out to my pleasant surprise that the first Indian forest officer was a Parsi named Framjee Rustomjee Desai, the son (then aged 20, according to some sources) of a Bombay merchant. Unfortunately, the government archives seem to have no further information on Desai except that he was among the seven gentlemen who would become the first officers of the Imperial Forest Service. [In 1921, the name was changed to Indian Forest Service, (IFS), thus laying the foundation of the Forest Department in India.]
The only information I have been able to find on Desai is: "In 1867, five......