<p>Forest soil harbors a diverse, integrated microbial system that regulates physiochemical properties of soil and support plant growth. Soil microbial communities make the availability of macro and micronutrients; those are perpetually used through biogeochemical cycles. This ensures the sustainability of forest ecosystem. Culture dependent method is not enough to generate a complete figure of total forest soil microbiome. Hence, present investigation employed metagenomic analysis, culture independent method to understand the microbial ecology of a tropical forest including the physicochemical properties of the forest soil. The pH of soil was lower (5.85 ± 0.40) in degraded forest than dense forest (6.18 ± 0.42). The amount of essential soil nutrients such organic carbon, phosphate, sulphur, manganese were higher (1.39 ± 0.29%, 19.18 ± 4.99&#xa0;kg&#xa0;ha⁻¹, 63.78 ± 2.66&#xa0;kg&#xa0;ha⁻¹, 39.57 ± 5&#xa0;kg&#xa0;ha⁻¹) in dense forest as compared to the values (0.65 ± 0.25%, 18.90 ± 2.22&#xa0;kg&#xa0;ha⁻¹, 15.83 ± 0.54&#xa0;kg&#xa0;ha⁻¹, 37.87 ± 1.68&#xa0;kg&#xa0;ha⁻¹) found in degraded forest soil. In degraded forest soil sample, metagenomes contained 0.09 million reads and 53.5% GC content while dense forest soil sample had 0.4 million reads and 58.5% GC content. Alpha diversity indices suggested that bacterial varieties of degraded forest soil were higher than dense forest soil. The most dominating phylum was Proteobacteria in both soil microbiomes. These studies had successfully identified 113 unique genera in degraded, 34 unique genera in dense forest soil microbiome and around 91 common genera to both microbiomes. Here, <i>Acinetobacter</i> and&#xa0;<i>Candidatus Solibacter</i> were the most dominating bacterial genera in degraded and dense forest soil samples, respectively. Overall study has demonstrated that, degradation of forest due to anthropogenic activities have altered microbial composition and diversity to some extent.</p>