Chirag Kasbekar

Community forestry has proven to be a powerful tool in the preservation and regeneration of India's fast-diminishing forest tracts. Thanks to backing from the Dorabji Tata Trust, this concept now has an improved chance of succeeding

"Whenever we saw people in uniform — forest department officials — coming, we would hide," says Kancheta Lal, a villager from Khatpura in the Sehore district of Madhya Pradesh. "What if they caught us? There really was no point talking to them."

The scenario Lal describes is part of a government-controlled forest management system which views local communities, mired in poverty, as thieves robbing the nation. Only recently has this system started creating space for Lal and people like him. Unfortunately, it still exists across much of India's forest area: forest communities disconnected from their heritage, and with little stake in conserving it.

Every Indian state has a forest department to administer its forest expanses. Recognised as the sole keeper of the land under its control, this department's expertise lies in putting a cost to the timber in its domain. Issues such as biological diversity and the cultural and economic circumstances of local communities living in and around forest land rarely register on the department's radar.

Managing a forest involves some amount of juggling. India's forests throw up a multiplicity of values, human, animal and ecological, that have to be juggled under ever-shifting ground conditions. Almost one in five persons in the world is an Indian, but only 1.8 per cent of the world's forest cover is in India. If the country's forests had to have a chance, a new approach was needed.

In a small and extremely degraded portion of India's forest area, an interesting and vital experiment — backed by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust — is evolving into what could be the template for forest protection and regeneration in the country. It's called community forestry. Operating under the umbrella of the joint forest management (JFM) initiative, as spelled out in the 1988 Forest Policy of India, this experiment embraces multiple elements. It has in its fold forest protection committees (FPCs) and village forest committees (VFCs), comprising local villagers and officials as well as the forest department, and it also works with non-governmental organisations.

It is a structure that is open, where human interests and values are aligned to the goals of sustainable forest management. Meeting the subsistence and development needs of local communities is one of the goals of the new system. This means that forest preservation efforts are integrated with community development and poverty reduction endeavours.

Much of the conservation activity under this project — limiting the illegal use of the forest, regulating the extraction of non-timber forest products and grazing, using scientific techniques to assist in the natural regeneration of forests — is carried out by local villagers.

The government still owns these forest lands, but there is a change in its attitude. In return for their forest protection efforts, local communities are given legal rights to profit from forest resources, provided the forest itself remains unharmed. The larger goal is to align the interests and values of local communities with that of the forest.

Ecological values are better served in the new system. An elaborately devised process of 'assisted natural regeneration' fights soil erosion and rejuvenates the biological diversity and density of large forest tracts. The results are encouraging. Community forestry has now been adopted across 22 states and covers about 10.2 million hectares of forest land. More than 36,000 JFM committees constitute the backbone of this endeavour.

As evidenced by remote sensing images, the new system has increased forest cover and helped ecological regeneration in many areas, while improving the lives of forest communities all over India.

"It is the answer," says Dr Ram Prasad, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Madhya Pradesh, and a former director of the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal. Though he heads the bureaucracy of Madhya Pradesh's forest department, Dr Prasad is extremely excited by the prospects of decentralisation. "The best systems are those that directly empower people. In such a world, community forestry is like a bulldozer breaking down mindsets — within forest departments and elsewhere."

Given the complexity of the task, the new forest management structure needs not only separate nerve centres — community groups like the FPCs and the VFCs — but also some sort of a 'brain': to absorb information and experience, to convert disparate bits of data into systematic knowledge, and to translate this knowledge into a script for action.

Just such a brain is being developed by the IIFM with financial support from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. Called the International Centre for Community Forestry (ICCF), it has many functions.
It collates global experiences in community forestry and develops a knowledge base for researchers and practitioners. This knowledge would be useless if not applied, so the ICCF has chosen sites across the country where it trains local communities and practitioners to make use of it. The Centre currently has ten sites in six states — Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa — where it is works with local JFM committees and non-governmental bodies.

This is where the contributions made by institutions such as the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust are invaluable. According to Mukund Gorakshkar, programme officer at the Trust, its grant to the ICCF is designed to cover all of the new institute's functions. But the Trust's involvement in the initiative is not limited to providing money.

"The importance of the grant which the Trust has so generously provided us cannot be overemphasised, but the ICCF has also benefited from the Trust's close involvement with the institute, and from being linked to the network of organisations that the Trust has nurtured," says Dr Prodyut Bhattacharya, a coordinator at the Centre and an IIFM faculty member.

Mr Gorakshkar explains the Trust's approach: "As a philanthropic trust with a national coverage, we are trying to combine the inherent strengths of all our grantees to generate a little more impact from every grant that we make. We have grown to appreciate the advantages of a consortium of partners. We understand that the forest will not survive unless revenue lands and the common resources of villages are made regenerative." To achieve this, he says, organisations and people from a variety of fields need to work together.

India's community forestry movement needs more benefactors like the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. Without resources and other inputs from the outside, the country's forests could diminish much faster than now. We could end up missing the woods and the trees.

Uploaded on March 2005