Strategies for the involvement of the landless and women in afforestation: Five case studies from India
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of the landless and
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1
World
Employment
J Programme
Strategies for the involvement
of the landless and
women in afforestation:
Five case studies from India
A technical co-operation report
*
J International Labour Office Geneva
' *
2#
♦
Strategies for the involvement
of the landless and
women in afforestation:
Five case studies from India
A technical co-operation report
by
Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain
Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi
World Employment Programme
International Labour Office Geneva
Copyright © International Labour Organisation 1990
Publications of the International Labour Office enjoy copyright under Protocol 2 of the Universal Copyright Convention.
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For rights of reproduction or translation, application should be made to the Publications Branch (Rights and Permissions),
International Labour Office, CH-1211 Geneva 22, Switzerland. The International Labour Office welcomes such applications.
ISBN 92-2-107216-9
First published 1990
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Printed by the International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland
(3 - I CT O
i
M*IO
- iii -
Contents
Page
PREFACE
v
INTRODUCTION
vi i
CHAPTER I:
CHAPTER II:
BACKGROUND TO THE CASE STUDIES
1
Biomass-based subsistence economy of the poor
The alienated commons
A critique of the ongoing social forestry programme
Rationale for selection of case studies ........
1
5
7
10
CASE STUDY:
FARM FORESTRY IN WEST BENGAL
The social forestry project
Reasons for planting trees
Choice of species
CHAPTER III:
CASE STUDY:
VILLAGE WOODLOT SCHEME IN MAHARASHTRA
The social forestry project
Reluctance of panchayats to manage woodlots
Problems of the poor
CHAPTER IV:
CASE STUDY:
WATERSHED MANAGEMENT IN
SUKHOMAJRI VILLAGE (HARYANA)
Siltation of Sukhana lake
Environmental poverty in Sukhomajri village
Water management attempts
Resolving fundamental equity issues
Creating ecological infrastructure
Control over commons
CHAPTER V:
CASE STUDY:
COMMUNITY FORESTRY BY THE CHIPKO MOVEMENT
IN CHAMOLI (UTTAR PRADESH)
The region
People’s movement against deforestation
People’s movement for afforestation ...
Initial meetings and strategy
Obstacles and opportunities
Land for plantation
Community control over distribution ...
Results
.................
CHAPTER VI:
CHAPTER VII:
8445d
CASE STUDY:
CO-OPERATIVE FORESTRY IN A SALINE
AREA OF GUJARAT
15
15
17
20
22
22
24
25
28
28
30
31
32
33
36
36
39
40
41
43
43
44
46
Search for alternative economic options
Obstacles and conflicts
46
47
CONCLUSIONS
50
- iv -
List of tables and map
Page
Description of case study projects: State, ecological
conditions, agency, legal ownership of land planted,
and beneficiaries .............................
11
Table 2:
Progress in farm forestry programme in West Bengal,
targets and achievements, 1981-85 .............
16
Table 3:
Species planted in four major districts.
West Bengal Social Forestry Project (per cent)
18
Table 4:
Landholding patterns of participants in four major districts.
West Bengal Social Forestry Project (per cent) ...........
19
Progress in Maharashtra in village woodlots, villages and
area covered, 1982-85 ............................
23
Benefits of watershed protection to Sukhomajri village,
in fodder yield and milk protection before and after ••
32
Number of milch animals in Sukhomajri before and after
watershed protection, 1977-83 ...................
33
Analysis of case study projects: Benefits to landless and
marginal farmers, involvement of women, and conflicts ....
51
Map of India showing locations of case studies
12
Table 1:
*
Table 5:
Table 6:
Table 7:
Table 8:
Map 1:
8445d
V
PREFACE
The landless and women are two major target groups of ILO anti-poverty
programmes. ILO research of the past ten years has demonstrated the key role
of women in meeting their families’ basic needs, food production and income
earning.
More recently, the crucial linkages between rural poverty and
environmental degradation, both as cause and effect, have begun to receive
increasing attention.
In most rural economies, people depend on natural resources for their
livelihoods: agricultural land, rangelands and fisheries provide food, forest
and bush areas provide biomass for fuel, fodder, housing, tools and other
minor forest products, and water sources determine health and sanitation. The
rural poor especially rely for their survival on ’’common property” - forests,
grazing areas and land - that belongs to the community rather than to
individuals. These common resources are increasingly becoming privatised,
overused and degraded. Rural women are hardest hit by this environmental
crisis, as their traditional responsibilities for fuel and water collection
become more difficult and they lose access to fuel and raw materials necessary
to their income-earning activities.
Promoting rural employment and rural
development in the future will depend critically on preserving, creating and
improving ecological systems that can provide food, basic needs, income and
employment for the poor, including landless and women, on a sustainable basis.
Afforestation is one of the major strategies being promoted in developing
countries with the objectives of simultaneously improving the environment and
providing employment and livelihood in rural areas.
The present study documents and assesses five cases of afforestation
programmes in India.
It was carried out under an inter-regional research
project on energy and rural women’s work, with the support of the Netherlands
Government under the Programme on Rural Women of the Rural Employment Policies
Branch of the ILO. Comparative studies have been completed in Peru, Ghana,
Mozambique, India and Indonesia., The present study is a more policy-oriented
effort intended to offer lessons and promote discussion in India as well as in
other developing countries.
Similarly, the ILO’s Programme on Rural Women has initiated pilot
women*’s groups in afforestation and wasteland
projects involving rural women
development in the Indian States of West Bengal and Gujarat, which, it is
hoped, will contribute some fresh ideas on creation of collective asset base,
new forms of community and women's organisations ensuring their control over
resources. It is intended to further promote the experience and approach in
other countries. The documentation and exchange of experiences such as those
recounted here is an essential part of this development.
Azita Berar-Awad
Programme on Rural Women
Rural Employment Policies Branch
8445d
- vii INTRODUCTION
Over the past 40 years, India has lost 45 million hectares of forest, and
forests continue to be depleted at a rate of 1.5 million hectares a year.
Officially, it is admitted that barely 10 per cent of the country is under
forests, even though a minimum of 33 per cent is judged necessary for
environmental stability. A number of Indian wood-based industries such as
pulp and paper are operating below capacity due to the lack of raw materials.
Poles are in short supply in urban markets. Rural people are increasingly
forced to cook using substitutes for fuelwood like dung and crop residues,
which would be better used as manure for crop production and as fodder for
livestock. How has this situation come about?
Up until the mid-1800s, there was no state control over forests in India,
rather village and tribal communities had developed a variety of social and
cultural institutions that enabled the prudent utilisation of forest
products. The British Colonial Government asserted its monopoly over forests
as part of the railway expansion and denied village rights in the imperial
interest.
After 1947, the Indian Government continued to exercise state
control over forests in the national interest, primarily with a view to
managing forests to meet the requirements of the forest industries sector and
to earn revenue.
At the same time, other forces combined to put pressure on forest
resources : increasing human and animal populations, agricultural expansion due
to resettlement programmes, submersion by irrigation and hydropower projects,
urban demand for building materials and fuel, and forest fires.
By the
mid-sixties, traditional forest management was unable to meet the rapidly
growing industrial demand for wood products. Production forestry was tried,
in which large areas of natural forest were clearfelled and planted with
quick-growing, exotic species, many of which gave poor results under Indian
conditions.
In the meantime, rural India was increasingly suffering from
shortages of fuel, fodder, timber, and raw materials for small industry.
Foresters - whose job it was to protect the forests from local villagers so
that wood products could be made available to industry in the "national
interest" - were increasingly coming into conflict with people, who
desperately needed the biomass products from forest areas for their survival.
"Social forestry” was introduced by the National Commission on
Agriculture in India's Fifth Five-Year Plan in 1976 with a view to promoting
plantation of trees by rural communities to meet their needs of fodder, fuel,
small timber and fruits. Most major states began social forestry programmes
in the early 1980s, augmented by various centrally sponsored schemes like the
Rural Fuelwood Programme, the National Rural Employment Programme, and the
Prime Minister’s afforestation initiative, the National Wasteland Development
Board. The Sixth Five-Year Plan in 1981 provided for Rs. 692.49 millions of
investment in forestry, more than had been spent in the entire previous 30
years of planned development. In addition, a number of foreign donors and the
World Bank have supported social forestry projects in different states.
Social forestry has three components: farm forestry, encouraging farmers
to plant trees on their own farms by distributing free or subsidised
seedlings. woodlots planted by the forest department for the needs of the
community, along roadsides, canal banks and other public lands, and community
woodlots planted by communities themselves on community lands to be shared
equally \
by them., The second two components have had little impact. The real
success story has been farm forestry, where progress has been spectacular and
targets have generally been exceeded. Since 1980-81, 1,000 crore of seedlings
have been distributed to farmers for farm forestry on private lands.
8445d
- viii
This success story has none the less been challenged by many critics on a
number of grounds. Critics charge that:
social forestry is primarily a response to the failure of production
forestry and is oriented towards meeting the needs of wood-based industry
and urban areas, while the glaring fuel and fodder crises facing the poor
continue to grow.
In fact, the species planted — mainly eucalyptus,
pine, and other non-fodder species - are mainly being marketed as poles
and raw materials for industry. Wood has become too valuable for tthe
—
and
they
are
forced
to
use
dung,
crop
residues
and
leaves
poor to burn,
as fuel.
natural forests, especially sal forests, provide many benefits to the
poor that plantation forestry cannot provide - foodstuffs, such as edible
fruits, roots and small game animals - especially during the lean period
of the year and as insurance against famine, grazing lands for domestic
animals, food and other commodities collected for sale and barter, such
as fruit and flowers, seeds, leaves, grasses, building materials, fuel,
and social and ritual needs.
big farmers are the primary beneficiaries of farm forestry, enjoying
incentives and subsidies from the state while profiting from the
lucrative cash cropping of trees.
With the current high profits
available, large farmers are even converting good quality agricultural
land and using irrigation in tree farming. Tree farming also has lower
labour requirements than food crops, which some studies claim is reducing
rural employment and promoting absentee landlordism.
eucalyptus and other monocultures do little for ecological restoration
for enhancing soil fertility or for soil and water conservation, and
indeed may be leading to irretrievable environmental degradation. One of
the attractions of these species for wood-growing is that they are not
palatable to cattle, and therefore cannot be used for fodder, even though
fodder is one of the most critical biomass needs in rural India.
Proponents of social forestry reply that wood production of any kind will
help to take pressure off India's forests, and that it is not surprising that
farmers respond to the lure of cash income rather than production of firewood
for household use, since household fuel is collected mainly by women whose
time is seen as having a low value. They admit, however, that social forestry
in general has failed to reach its purported objective of producing fuelwood
for domestic use, and has rather encouraged farmers (and mainly large
landholders) to grow trees as a commercial crop for poles and paper mills.
This is a continuing debate whose complexities can only be alluded to
here, but it is against this background that the present study must be
viewed.
The CSE authors argue that while social forestry as initially
promoted has failed to benefit the poor, opportunities do none the less exist
for involving landless and marginal farmers and women in afforestation
programmes.
Indeed, afforestation could potentially be the basis for a
fundamental development in the countryside. As the Indian Law Institute has
explained in its analysis of the Forest Act, afforestation is in fact a major
campaign for land reform in India, in this case for reform of the laws
governing rights of use and ownership of public rather than private lands, to
shift land use policy from the current framework used to control and exploit
forests to fresh laws needed to carry out afforestation. In the future, the
Institute argues forestry is an important alternative to agriculture on
degraded public lands and may even engage an equal labour force. Between 100
and 150 million hectares, roughly one-third to one-half of the land area in
India are classified as wastelands - due to wind and water erosion, water
8445d
- ix logging, salinisation and alkaline lands. A portion of these lands is already
in the hands of poor households, who under earlier land reforms have received
low-quality land that they have hitherto been unable to cultivate. Others
belong to large private landholders. Some is community land, which village
councils have hitherto been reluctant to use for forestry as this is the only
land available for grazing. Most wastelands, however, are government-owned,
officially classified as forests, but actually degraded lands. Afforestation
could potentially rehabilitate these barren lands environmentally, while
providing land and employment to the poor. As the authors state, ’’With the
crying need for biomass today, India will never get a better opportunity to
harness the power of its people to the power of its land, to strike at the
roots of landlessness, poverty and unemployment, all at the same time, through
the massive afforestation of these wastelands.”
The problem which the authors of this study deal with here is, what are
the social, institutional and other conditions for making these wastelands
more productive, while taking into account the needs of the poor and women?
They first describe the biomass-based subsistence economy of the poor in
India, how the poor have become alienated by the state from their traditional
common lands, and how the present social forestry programme has generally
failed to improve this situation. Five cases of afforestation in India are
then identified where ’’dealienation” of the common lands has been attempted,
in an effort to involve and benefit the landless and marginal farmers and/or
women. The five cases are in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh
and Gujarat, and the projects selected are being implemented by both
government and non-government agencies.
In one case (West Bengal), the
commons have been privatised, by parcelling them out to individual families
through a land reform. In the other four cases, entire village communities or
sub-groups have been involved in afforestation and protection; two of the
cases (Haryana and Uttar Pradesh) are relatively homogeneous villages in terms
of social structure, the other two (Maharasthra and Gujarat) are villages
having a high degree of social stratification.
The lessons learned are both inspiring and sobering.
Although farm
forestry of the degraded lands received in the West Bengal land reform has
been highly successful in providing employment to the poor beneficiaries of
the land reform and in raising their incomes, their privatisation has reduced
the area of common lands available to non-beneficiaries. Farm forestry has
not reduced the grazing pressure on forests, since the species grown do not
produce fodder. For these and other reasons, the authors favour a strategy of
protecting and enriching common lands while still retaining them as commons,
rather than privatising them as in farm forestry. In this way, benefits can
in theory be shared by the community, with provisions built in to ensure that
the landless and land-poor benefit on a priority basis. The remaining four
case studies document such attempts.
The world-famous Chipko Movement in Uttar Pradesh and a watershed
management effort in Haryana are uplifting examples of community mobilisation
around environmental preservation that is perceived as having direct economic
benefits for the community. Innovative resource management mechanisms and
effective new community organisations have been created as a result. But as
the authors point out, these are probably exceptional cases in India, in that
the communities are relatively homogenous and favourable climatic and soil
conditions prevail, making the returns to simple conservation measures higher
and co-operation easier.
In the two remaining cases, community co-operation has been a failure.
In Maharashtra, despite the project objective of providing fuelwood for the
7
—j it has proven impossible even to transfer management of village woodlots
poor.
established by the Forest Department to village panchayats (elected councils).
8445d
X
due to the multiplicity of interests in the villages; the poor, who have no
voice in the panchayats, have also had no voice in afforestation. In Gujarat,
successful farm forestry on degraded lands by a lower-caste group has provoked
class conflict and violence by the upper caste, who have seen their
traditional low-wage labour supply escaping to find an alternative economic
option in afforestation.
Noticeably, with the exception of the Chipko
experience, the involvement of women, even in these cases, is minimal.
In conclusion, the authors lay out some conditions under which community
involvement in protection and enrichment of the commons can be successful by
assuring community control, unity and equity.
A plea for new forms of
community organisations,
in particular to ensure the more effective
involvement of women as well as of the poor, is also made. Finally, the
authors point out that even these attempts at taking into account the needs of
the poor ar still the exception rather than the rule in India. Certainly, it
is clear that even in cases where there is a focus on the rural poor in social
forestry, there is a need for further innovative approaches and experiments.
8445d
CHAPTER I
BACKGROUND TO THE CASE STUDIES
Biomass-based subsistence economy of the poor
5
The vast majority of rural households in India meet their daily household
subsistence needs through biomass or biomass-related products,
mostly
collected freely from their immediate environment.
In short, the poor in
India live within what can be called ’’biomass-based subsistence economy”.
Food, fuel (firewood, cow dung, crop wastes), fodder, fertiliser (organic
manure, forest litter, leaf mulch), building materials (poles, thatch), herbs
and clothing are all biomass products.
Water is not biomass
Water is another crucial input for survival.
its
availability
and
quality
are
closely
related
to the level of
itself, but
biomass available in the surrounding environment. Once the forests disappear,
local ponds silt up, village wells dry up and perennial streams get reduced to
seasonal ones.
The water balance is totally upset by the destruction of
vegetation.
In a monsoon climate like India's, with highly uneven rainfall
over the year, the reduction in tree cover translates into greatly increased
run-off and floods during the peak water season, and greatly increased drought
and water scarcity in the dry season.
The magnitude of India's dependence on biomass for meeting crucial
household needs can be appreciated by looking at the energy situation,
Despite India’s large industrial sector, over 50 per cent of fuel consumption
In developed
is for an activity as fundamental to survival as cooking.
countries, cooking consumes less than 10 per cent of total national fuel
consumption, Even more important is the fact that over 90 per cent of cooking
fuel in India consists of biomass: firewood, cow dung and crop wastes, Even
Annual urban
urban households are heavily dependent on biomass as fuel,
household expenditures on fuelwood alone in India are well over Rs.500
million.1
Biomass resources not only meet crucial household needs, but also provide
a range of raw materials for traditional occupations and crafts and are thus a
firewood and cow dung are important sources of
major source of employment:
fuel for potters;
bullock carts and catamaran fishing boats are built of
wood;
bamboo is a vital raw material for basket weavers and so on.
Traditional crafts are being threatened not only by the introduction of modern
products, but also by the acute shortage of biomass-based raw materials.
A study by the Indian Institute of Science - the first in India on the
changing market for bullock carts - reports that farmers in Ungra village in
Karnataka can no longer afford to buy bullock carts constructed in the
2
traditional way with wooden wheels, because wood has become too expensive.
A recent report by the Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre in Madras adds that
traditional fisherfolk now find it very difficult to make catamarans because
3
the special wood required is scarce and costly.
State government and forest department policies are in many cases
responsible for shortages faced by local producers, In their bid to attract
industry, forests have been leased at throw-away prices by state governments
to industrial producers, while local producers face shortages and higher
prices. Studies from all over India portray the extreme difficulties faced by
hundreds of thousands of basket weavers in eking out a bare existence, because
of the acute shortages of bamboo. In the Bhandara and Chandrapur districts of
In Karnataka,
Maharashtra, nearly 70,000 basket weavers face this problem.
8445d
2
following a series of protests by basket weavers, the Indian Institute of
Science undertook a study on the use of the state's bamboo forests by paper
mills. The study found that whereas bamboo was available to paper mills at
Rs. 15 per tonne, basket weavers and other small bamboo users were obliged to
pay Rs.1,200 a tonne in the open market.4 Social activities in Saharanpur
have also pointed out the travails of baan makers who have recently been
deprived of their earlier sources of bhabhar grass.
The Forest Development
Corporation of the State of Uttar Pradesh discriminates in favour of paper
mills and this policy has turned thousands of baan workers into destitutes,
landless labourers and urban migrants. Wood is now difficult to get even for
making agricultural implements like the plough, especially the species of wood
that have traditionally been used for these implements.
For example, one
factor that led to development of the now famous Chipko Movement was the anger
of local people over the Forest Department's refusal to provide them with ash
wood, traditionally used for making ploughs, while the same ash wood was being
allocated by the Forest Department to sports goods manufacturers.
Even common biomass resources like thatch are becoming so scarce that
maintenance of mud and thatch huts has become difficult. A report form Bastar
(still one the the most heavily forested districts in the country) points to a
village where no new hut has been built over the last two decades because the
Traditional mud roofs
entire area around the village has been deforested, 5
have disappeared from many parts of the country because of the large
quantities of timber needed to construct them, Mud roofs are being replaced
by tiled roofs, but baking of tiles still requires large quantities of
firewood.
With only 2.45 per
Fodder is another vital resource in acute shortage,
cent of the world's land mass, India supports 15 per cent of the world's
cattle, 52 per cent of its buffaloes, and 15 per cent of its goats. All these
animals play an extremely important role in the integrated system of
A study from
agriculture and animal husbandry practised by Indian farmers.
the tribal areas of Gujarat shows that the shortage of fodder, especially from
public lands, prevents poor landless households and marginal farmers from
benefiting much from the milk co-operatives and animal improvement schemes
Grazing lands have also been
region, 6
that have been introduced in the region.
neglected and today their productivity is not even one-tenth of their
potential.
With 80 per cent of India living in villages, millions of people are
heavily dependent on biomass sources for their daily existence.
In such a
situation destruction of the environment, or policies that reduce access of
the poor to biomass resources, will have an extremely adverse impact on the
daily lives of rural people.
Despite this near-total reliance on biomass resources for bare survival,
nature in India has steadily undergone a major transformation over the past
decades, There are two major pressures operating on the country’s natural
The first is generated by population growth and leads to
resources today.
The second pressure is
increased household demand for biomass resources.
coming from modernisation, industrialisation and the general penetration of
This modernisation has affected nature in two ways,
the cash economy.
Firstly, it has been extremely destructive of the environment in its search
Secondly, modernisation steadily
for cheap biomass-based raw materials.
In biological
transforms the very character of the natural environment.
terms. the tendency is to reduce the diversity in natural forest areas and
The ecological role of the
transform them into high-yielding monocultures,
transformation.
In
original natural area is usually disregarded in this transformation,
social terms, the transformation is generally away from a natural environment
that has traditionally come to support household and community needs, and
8445d
c
3 -
towards an environment that is geared to meeting urban and industrial needs, a
’’forest” that is essentially cash-generating.
Excellent examples of such
transformations are the replacement of old oak forests by pine forests in the
Himalayas;
of sal forests by teak in the Chottanagpur Plateau;
and of
natural forests by eucalyptus plantations in the Western Ghats.
The new, commercial ’’nature” that is created is of little help to village
communities and their daily needs.
For this reason, there are people’s
protests in many parts of the country against the conversion of oak forests
into pine forests and of sal forests into teak forests. Neither pine nor teak
is of much interest to local communities.
The effect of this massive environmental change has been disastrous for
the people, especially in a country like India where, on the one hand, there
is high level of poverty and, on the other, a high level of population
density.
In such a situation, there is hardly any ecological space left in
the physical environment which is not occupied by one human group or another
for its subsistence.
If in the name of economic development, any human
activity results in the destruction of an ecological space or in its
transformation into something that benefits the more powerful groups in
society, then inevitably those who were earlier dependent on that space will
suffer. Development in this case leads to displacement and dispossession and
inevitably raise questions of social injustice and conflict.
The Indian
experience shows clearly that it is rare to find a case in which environmental
destruction does not go hand in hand with social injustice, almost like two
sides of the same coin.
One area where government policies have consistently increased conflicts
is forests.
The entire
tribal
population,
and
millions
of
other
forest-dwelling
people,
depend on
the forests for
their existence.
Destruction of forests has meant social, cultural and economic destruction of
the tribal populations in particular.
The Government leaves little or no
control over forest resources in the hands of the forest dwellers, Government
control over forests has definitely meant a reallocation of forest resources
away from the needs of local communities and towards the needs of urban and
industrial India.
The end result is both increased social conflict and
increased destruction of the ecological resource itself.
Those with limited access to the major resources of biomass, namely, the
landless, near-landless and cattle-less poor, are invariably those who are
most affected by reduced access to or the destruction of biomass available on
the commons, as well as by the transformation of biomass growing on private or
common lands.
The planting of eucalyptus in farmers’ fields - and even on so-called
’’barren” fields - is an excellent example of adverse biomass conversion. In a
village in Punjab, a rich farmer with over 100 ha of land stopped growing
cotton and switched to eucalyptus.
As long as he grew cotton, enormous
quantities of cotton sticks were available for the landless labourers in the
village to use as fuel. Because of the shortage of firewood, crop wastes from
the landlords’ fields were the major - and almost the only - source of fuel
for these poor landless villagers.
Now that eucalyptus has replaced cotton,
their main source of fuel has dried up, putting these landless labourers in a
precarious household energy position. The firewood that the landowner gets
from the trees is a commodity which can fetch cash as compared to the crop
wastes for which there was little commercial demand.
Fuelwood is thus ’’too
valuable” to distribute free as fuel to labourers. Also firewood, as compared
to crop residues, is harvested mainly only once in six to seven years - a long
wait for fuel-hungry labourers.
This is a case where afforestation has
actually created a fuel famine for the neediest sector of the community.
8445d
4
What happens when eucalyptus is grown on a ’’barren” piece of land?
Usually no land is barren, unless of course it is highly eroded in which case
even eucalyptus cannot' be grown on it. Generally, barren lands have large
quantities of weeds growing on them. With the destruction of India’s original
vegetation, several aggressive weeds like Lantana, Parthenium and Eupatorium
have taken over the country. None of these weeds are palatable to animals and
they therefore survive the pressure of grazing.
These weeds now play an
extremely important role in the vital supply of cooking fuel for the poor.
A weed is a plant which has no economic value, but in the socio-economic
reality of India, even weeds have a role.
For poor households who have no
lands of their own, weeds growing on public lands are extremely useful,
exactly because of the very fact that weeds are not desired by the modern
sector of the economy. Once weeds acquire an economic value, even they go out
of the hands of the poor.
Thus, when a patch of barren land is planted with eucalyptus, even weeds
are no longer available to poor landless households and their fuel crisis
intensifies. Reports from all over the country show that women often sweep
away dry eucalyptus leaves form eucalyptus plantations for use as fuel.
As even those ’’waste” forms of biomass used by the poor become
commercialised, access by the poor to these biomass sources is automatically
reduced because of their limited, purchasing power.
The trend towards
commercialisation of firewood has been so rapid in the last 15 years that it
is now rare to find poor households using much firewood at all, especially in
the form of logs. Firewood is less and less a fuel of the poor, but rather a
fuel of the relatively rich. The poor now subsist on qualitatively inferior
sources of biomass fuels: crop residues, weeds, twigs, cow dung and whatever
organic wastes they can find. The commercialisation of biomass, and its drain
towards those who have the power to purchase, will inevitably harm the poor
and erode the non-monetised, biomass-based, subsistence economy.
The maximum impact of the destruction of biomass sources is on women.
Women in all rural cultures are affected, but especially women from poor
landless, marginal and small farming families. Given the culturally accepted
division of labour within the family, the collection of household necessities
like fuel, fodder and water is left to women. As the environment degrades and
survival needs become increasingly difficult to collect, women have to spend
an extraordinary amount of time foraging for fuel, fodder and water in
addition to their normal household work, agricultural work and caring for
animals. Although various studies have been done, there is still not enough
data on the time spent by women on their daily household activities and how it
differs across different eco-climatic zones of India.
The worst situation is in the arid and semi-arid parts of the country and
In all these areas trees and forests have
in the hill and mountain villages,
soil and climatic
been steadily destroyed.
Because of a number of factors
conditions, very small landholdings, lack of irrigation, etc. - the Green
Revolution has not reached these areas (as it has in the Punjab and Haryana,
where trees are few but the Green Revolution has meant an enormous increase in
biomass from crop lands). As a result, there is now an acute biomass famine
in these areas. In these arid regions, women can spend as much as five or six
hours every day, and in some households as much as ten hours daily, just
collecting fuel and fodder. On the contrary, in a state like Kerala, where
eco-climatic conditions permit a rich green cover, the work burden of women is
much smaller, probably the lowest in the country.
Even the minimal land
reforms in Kerala, in which each landless family has been distributed
one-tenth of an acre as a homestead plot, have meant access to a few dozen
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coconut trees, which are already enough
household’s annual fuel requirements.
to
provide
at
least
half
the
The penetration of the cash economy is affecting relationships between
men and women in a peculiar way and is creating; a real dichotomy in their
Men
have become more involved with the
respective relationships with nature. 1.
— --cash economy than women. Women continue to deal with the non-monet ised,
biomass-based subsistence economy of the household.
Various estimates have put the total wastelands in India at anything
between 100 to 150 million hectares, roughly one-third to one-half of the
country's land area. These wastelands cover both private as well a public
lands. With the crying need for biomass today, India will never get a better
opportunity to harness the power of its people to the power of its land, to
strike at the roots of landlessness, poverty and unemployment, all at the same
time, through massive afforestation of these wastelands. But such a programme
of afforestation must involve landless and near-landless households, and
especially the women in these households on a priority basis to ensure that
the biomass demands of the neediest are met first.
The alienated commons
But why do the poor and landless, who suffer so much from the shortage of
biomass, not plant all the trees and grasses they need? Why does one-third to
one-half of India increasingly become a wasteland? Clear answers to these
questions are crucial to developing afforestation strategies in India.
The answer really lies in the alienation of village communities from
their commons created by the modern state. Crop lands have traditionally been
almost entirely private property, but until the advent of the modern state,
grazing lands, forest lands and water bodies were mostly common property, and
village communities played an important role in their use and management. The
British colonial administration was the first to nationalise these resources
in India and to bring them under the management of government bureaucracies.
In other words, the British initiated a policy of converting common property
resources into government property resources. The management of forests was
taken over in the name of conservation - officials were called forest guards
and conservators of forests.
But in reality, both in British and in
post-independent India, these common resources have been ruthlessly exploited
and sold to contractors by these very officials almost to the point of their
decimation. This exploitation has been mainly to meet the needs of the elite,
whereas the needs of the poor, who survived on these resources, were neglected
and even blamed for the ecological destruction. Thus, both colonial and
post-colonial governments have expropriated these common resources from the
poor and reallocated them to the more powerful in society.
This perfidy
towards the poor can even be noticed in the terminology that officialdom
uses.
For people dependent on forests produce such as fruits, medicinal
herbs, small timber for building purposes, firewood and fodder, and so on are
the major products of forests. But government forest departments call these
"minor
'minor forest produce" whereas timber is designated as the major forest
product. Forest dwellers seldom have any need for timber, except for minor
building purposes. Timber is the major forest product only for the modern
urban-industrial system.
This expropriation has alienated the people from their commons and has
started a free-for-all in exploiting India's forest resources, Today, India’s
tribals, who have lived in harmony with the forests for centuries, are so
alienated that they do not feel anything when they fell a green tree to sell
it off for a pittance. Repeatedly, these forest dwellers ask, "What is the
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point in saving the forests, because if the poor do not take them first, the
forest contractors will take the trees away?”
Their desperate economic
condition, made worse by ecological destruction, has left the poor with no
other option but to cut trees.
In a region of the Aravali mountains, near the city of Udaipur, there is
a tribal village in which no forests are left. The people there are extremely
poor and men regularly migrate in search of jobs to Udaipur. The women are
left to survive by scrounging around for weeds and twigs for cooking fuel.
Even headloading of firewood came to a halt in this village seven or eight
years ago because of the scarcity of wood. When asked, ’’Where have all the
forests gone?” the women replied, "They have gone away to Udaipur.” But when
asked, ”If your lives are so dependent on the forests, why did you allow them
to cut so ruthlessly?” the women replied, ’’But at that time everyone was doing
so, including the government.” Today the alienation from common resources is
total.
The Chipko Movement was the first major ecological movement in the
country to assert the rights of the village communities. When, in 1974, the
women of Reni village prevented the felling of the Reni Forest, they were
essentially saying, ’’This may be a government forest, but we live next to it,
and our needs (for ecological security from landslides, for basic needs like
water, fuel, fodder and wood for agricultural implements) have priority. it
Unless people’s alienation from their commons can be arrested and
reversed, there cannot be any proper afforestation of common lands.
In a
country like India where agriculture and animal husbandry are closely
intertwined activities and the pressure of the animals on grazing resources is
extremely high, plantations and grasslands will have to be protected from
animals, especially if the biomass that is grown is to be ’’multipurpose”, that
is, capable of meeting the crucial need of fodder. Any attempt to enclose an
area of land will be strongly resented by the people, however underproductive
it may be for fear of loss of grazing land. All such attempts will be
subverted unless the poor are fully assured that the biomass which is grown
inside those enclosures will meet their felt needs on a priority basis. If
public participation is not assured, then either survival rates of seedlings
will be very poor or anti-social, non-browsable plants like eucalyptus will be
planted - a technical fix for a social problem.
What are these common lands, and why are they so crucial to meeeting the
basic survival needs of the poor?
Common property resources, broadly
speaking, are the resources accessible to whole village communities and over
which no individual has exclusive property rights. According to land use
classification figures in the country, a total of 119.12 million hectares or
as much as 40 per cent of the land area of the country is under forests,
arable and non-arable wastelands and grazing lands.7 These common property
resources constitute both lands exclusively demarcated for community use as
well as lands under the forest and revenue departments of India, which are
under
state
control
but
are
used
by village
communities
despite
laws
and
restrictions.
Poor small and marginal farmers and the landless have no option but to
get their biomass needs from these lands - and with an increasing intensity of
use. Firstly, more and more land is being privatised, either legally or
illegally, and this means that the poor are squeezed onto smalller pieces of
common lands which are then over-exploited. And secondly, community lands the permanent grazing lands which are mostly under the panchayats (elected
village councils) - total only roughly 12 million hectares, or 4 per cent of
the land area,8 grossly inadequate to meet the survival needs of the
majority of the people in the country. In contrast, as much as 3 per cent of
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7
the country’s land area is under sanctuaries and national parks - reserved
exclusively for animals and birds. This scarcity again drives the poor to eke
out their subsistence needs from lands which are by law inaccessible to them.
How great is this dependence on the common lands? Studies carried out on
the poor’s dependence on common lands in dry regions have found that even
though totally neglected by policy-makers, common property resources play a
significant role in the life of the rural poor.
Dr N.S. Jodha, an eminent
economist, has extensively studied common property resources in the country.
His study, based on data from over 80 districts in 21 districts spread over
dry regions of seven states of India, reveals that these resources contribute
a significant proportion of the poor household’s subsistence and cash income
needs. According to his study, the area under common property resources has
declined by 26 to 63 per cent during the last three decades.
This area
includes both village pastures as well as government wastelands.
Jodha's
study found that while between 84 and 100 per cent of poor households gathered
food, fuel, fodder and fibre items from these lands, only 10 to 28 per cent of
large farmers made use of common lands.
’’Poor” were defined as households
with less that 2 ha of dry land equivalent.
Studies also show that poor
households meet 66 to 84 per cent of their total fuel requirements from common
lands and use them throughout the year.
In contrast, large farmers used the
commons sparingly and met only 8 to 13 per cent of their fuel needs from the
same lands. Similarly, between 70 and 90 per cent of the total grazing of the
poor’s animals was done on common lands.
The situation is likely to be
largely the same in most unirrigated regions of India, and certainly true in
9
all ecologically sensitive areas such as hill and mountain ranges.
Given that the poor are so dependent on common property resources, these
common lands will continue to be used and degraded, leading to lower
productivity and further scarcity. But these are the people and lands towards
which social forestry has to be directed.
A critique of the ongoing social forestry programme
India has seen a major thrust towards afforestation in the last five
years. Following Rs.483.22 crore of investment during the 20 years of planned
development between 1950 and 1980, the Sixth Plan (1980-85) provided for an
outlay of Rs.6,925 million for forestry - a 40 per cent increase over total
expenditure during the previous 30 years.
By the Seventh Plan (1985-90),
proposed investment was raised to the level of Rs.1,790 million, another
substantial increase.
A number of ambitious social forestry programmes have been launched by
state governments with the support of foreign aid agencies, namely, the World
Bank, United States Agency for International Development, and Swedish,
Canadian and British bilateral agencies.
Forest departments in most states
have set up separate social forestry wings.
The social forestry programme has four basic components:
(a)
farm forestry, which encourages farmers to plant trees on their own lands
by distributing free or subsidised seedlings;
(b)
village woodlots on village common lands,
department to meet the needs of the community;
(c)
strip plantations created by the forest department along roads, canals
and railway tracks, on lands belonging to the government departments
dealing with public works, irrigation and railways; and
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by
the
forest
8
(d)
afforestation of degraded forest lands by the forest department.
The two components which involve the people directly are farm forestry
and village woodlot plantations. Within these, the most spectacular success
has been that of farm forestry.
In Gujarat the off-take of seedlings increased fourfold between 1975 and
1979, from 12 million to 48 million per year; it doubled again to 100 million
by 1981 and increased further to 150 million in 1983.10 Assuming all these
seedlings were planted, this amounted to an average planting rate of more than
ten trees per person in the state. In most social forestry states like Uttar
Pradesh and West Bengal, the farm forestry component has overshot original
targets.
But in spite of this spectacular ’’success", farm forestry has totally
failed in its primary purpose - meeting the fuel and fodder needs of the
poor. Farm forestry involves planting trees on private land. This has meant,
of course, that the landless have been completely left out of the programme.
But small and marginal farmers have also failed to benefit much from the
programme, because they cannot afford to wait the long period for their
investment in the plantation to mature.
In Gujarat, for example, it is the
medium and large farmers who have largely benefited from farm forestry.
In
this state, more than 85 per cent of the participating farmers have more than
2 ha of land.
Given the acute shortage of raw material for wood-based industries, farm
forestry has essentially become extremely lucrative tree farming for industry
and cities. Farm forestry is thus being driven by an urban market demand and,
in some places, has led to tremendous distortions in the socio-economic fabric
of villages.
Larger farmers, who can afford to wait for their trees to
mature, have often brought good agricultural land under tree crops by
replacing other cereal or cash crops.
In many cases, even irrigation
facilities and chemical fertilisers have been used to get a high biomass
output while reducing the gestation period. In Gujarat, more than 60 per cent
of the land planted under farm forestry had earlier been under food and cash
crops. Because the driving force behind farm forestry is the high price that
timber fetches in the urban and industrial market, tree farmers have generally
chosen fast-growing,
non-browsable
exotics like eucalyptus,
casuarina,
Prosopis juliflora and Acacia auriculiformis, which do not provide any
fodder.
In addition, where tree farming takes place on lands that were
previously under food and cash crops, it can adversely affect the landless
poor in the village by reducing the availability of free crop residues used by
poor for domestic energy purposes.
Rural energy surveys show increasing
dependence on crop residues for household energy needs and on landed people
for the supply of these crop residues.
In addition, tree farming has been a boon to absentee landlords, who now
have a long-term crop which does not require constant supervision.
Some
studies also claim a loss in rural employment opportunities when farmers
switch from short-rotation food and cash crops to long-term tree farming. In
any event, it is clear that landless agricultural households have benefited
little from farm forestry.
A study undertaken by the State Government of Karnataka found that in the
years between 1984 and 1985, 96.2 per cent of the eucalyptus wood produced in
Bangalore district and 97.5 per cent of the eucalyptus production from Kolar
district was marketed. Almost the entire quantity was consumed as industrial
raw material by just one industry, Harihar Polyfibres, and only 3 per cent was
sold as firewood.11
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9
The second component of social forestry programmes is the village woodlot
or block plantation. These plantations have generally been created on village
panehayat (village council) lands, and in principle should benefit the entire
village community, including the landless and marginal farmers.
In reality,
however, the scheme has been badly throttled by village politics, and in most
states the village woodlot component has been a non-starter.
In West Bengal,
for instance, the programme fell 42 per cent short of the proposed target and
the scheme was drastically reduced at the time of the mid-term appraisal of
the project.12 Not only are panchayats uninterested in the scheme, but also
where the forest department has planted trees on village panchayat land there
has been no attempt to distribute the increased biomass resources to the
village community on an equitable basis, let alone on a preferential basis to
the landless and the poor. In fact, in this quagmire of village politics, the
landless have in most cases lost a part of their erstwhile grazing lands.
Under the third component of social forestry, the forest department
owned
by
government
departments,
undertakes
afforestation
on
lands
Plantations are created on strips along roadsides, canals and railway lines.
The produce of these plantations belongs to the respective departments after
deduction of the plantation cost.
An enormous amount is spent under this
component just to protect the plantations from grazing and firewood
In West Bengal, for instance, while the farm forestry component
collection.
costs only Rs.792 per hectare, strip plantations cost a high Rs.6,000 per
hectare.13
No indication has been given about who should be the beneficiaries of
these plantations.
In most states, when the plantations have matured, they
In a few states, efforts
have been auctioned off to wood-based industries,
have been made to involve landless households by encouraging them to undertake
a certain length of the strip plantation with financial and material
assistance from the forest department. But this strategy in the case of strip
plantations has been used only to an extremely limited extent.
Afforestation of degraded forest lands is the fourth component of the
There
are
two
approaches
towards
the
social
forestry
programme.
implementation of this scheme. The first and most commonly used approach is
to create the plantation as a conventional departmental plantation programme.
In this approach, the department simply plants trees on lands under its
control - invariably planting non-browsable exotics - and no attention is paid
to the distribution of the resources generated to neighbouring village
communities.
The general assumption is that these trees will be revenue
earners for the forest department and will be sold to wood-based industries.
Landless and marginal farmers can benefit from these plantations only by
cutting wood illegally.
The second approach to tree planting on degraded forest lands has been to
lease out small parcels to landless or land-poor tribal households to afforest
and protect themselves. The forest department provides financial and material
assistance for the plantation work and takes a share in the final income from
the sale of timber, while leaves, grasses, deadwood and other benefits like
fruits belong entirely to the tribal beneficiaries. Every year, new land is
given to the beneficiary family to afforest and protect if the previous year’s
plantation has been a success, and new land is continually leased to the
family till it acquires sufficient land to earn an income well above the
poverty line.
However, there are several problems with this approach. Firstly, these
schemes are entirely on an experimental scale. In the entire country not more
than a couple of thousand hectares have been afforested with this approach.
There is a general reluctance amongst the forest departments to lease out
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10
government forest lands because it is argued that the land will go out of
their control and possibly into ecologically adverse land uses like
agriculture. Secondly, even in these experimental schemes, little effort has
been made to involve the beneficiaries in making the choice of trees to be
planted. The species choice has invariably been imposed upon the beneficiary
families by the forest department.
Thirdly, and this is the most important
criticism of these schemes, is that they reduce the availability of the
commons to the remaining poor households who are not participants.
It is clear from the above description of the social forestry programmes
that though they may have been successful in planting many trees, they have
not benefited many poor, landless families and the involvement of women has
been minimal. Trees are being planted largely as a cash crop, not to meet
basic fuel and fodder needs.
Those components of the social forestry
programme which could have benefited the landless and land-poor households
have generally been neglected or have fallen way behind their targets.
Rationale for selection of case studies
Experience and studies in India have clearly shown that afforestation
must meet the survival needs of the landless and marginal farmers on a
priority basis and to do so must focus on common lands, which means the state
forest lands, revenue lands and village common lands.
There are two basic ways of dealing with this problem:
(1)
by privatising the commons, that is, by parcelling them out to individual
families; or
(2)
by protecting the commons
afforestation.
and
involving entire village communities
in
The five case studies presented in the following chapters are an attempt
to understand the various approaches being tried out in India today and to
document the experiences gained in each attempt. Table 1 lists the five case
study projects, their locations, ecological conditions, implementing agency,
legal ownership of the land planted, and beneficiaries. Their location is
shown on the map.
In the country today there are various schemes under which common lands
are being parcelled off as small plots to landless and marginal peasants in
the hope that they will take a special interest in developing these lands. In
the State of Rajasthan, for instance, there is a scheme to lease government
forest lands to landless and marginal peasants for afforestation. The scheme
includes a monthly stipend for afforesting and protecting a piece of land.
Every year the family is given two additional hectares to plant and protect,
and in this way the family can come to control 15 ha of government land under
a lease. The beneficiary family has full rights over the grass and other
produce but shares the final wood harvest with the Forest Department.
8445d
00
Ul
CL
Table 1.
Description of case study projects: State, ecological conditions,
agency, legal ownership of land planted, and beneficiaries
Project
State
Ecological conditions
Agency
Legal ownership
of land planted
Beneficiaries
West Bengal
farm forestry
West Bengal
Lateritic soils, high
rainfall areas of
Chotanagpur Plateau
Government Forest
Department
Private land
Individuals
Maharashtra
village
woodlots
Maharashtra
Semi-arid drylands
of the Deccan Plateau
in Marathwada
Government Forest
Department
Common land
(panchayat land)
Village
community
Sukhomajri
wa tershed
development
Haryana
High rainfall water
shed in Sivalik Hills
near Chandigarh
Government
research agency
working with non
governmental social
workers
Common land
(government
forest land)
Village
community
Chipko
afforestation
Uttar Pradesh
High rainfall, steep
slopes in the high
Himalayas of Uttar
Pradesh
Non-governmental
agency
Common land
(largely
panchayat land)
Village
community
Bhal
afforestation
Gujarat
Arid to semi-arid dry
land with high salinity
near the coast of
Gujarat
Non-governmental
agency
Common land (co
operative waste
land obtained
under a land
reform programme)
Specific caste
within the
village
I
12
Map 1.
Map of India showing locations of case studies
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NA HA AAiHTAA
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I
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8445d
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We have not studied any of these schemes, normally known as tree patta
schemes or social security schemes, but have studied the farm forestry
programme of the State of West Bengal, where the underlying principle is the
same as in the tree patta schemes.
In both, the approach is privatisation
giving individual families control over the tree produce in order to secure
their interests in afforestation.
Poor marginal farmers and landless are
given control over land, as in the case of West Bengal, or usufruct rights
over that land, as in the case of the tree patta scheme, for the purposes of
afforestation.
West Bengal has evolved an innovative scheme which links
In the state.
ongoing land reform programmes with the planting of trees,
landless and very small farmers have been distributed land - often marginal
land - under land reform programmes, and the farm forestry programme is now
providing them with the opportunity to plant trees on these lands.
The main problem with such schemes is that, in a densely populated
country, privatisation effectively closes access to common lands for the large
number of people within the village community who are not participants in the
schemes while giving land exclusively to a few members of the community.
The second, more difficult option, is to afforest common lands while
retaining them as common property. The questions then are who will plant the
trees and who will get the benefits, and how will the fuel, fodder and other
benefits be distributed?
Which community organisation will take on this
work?
Will it be through existing village-level organisations such as
panchayats, or will new community organisations be needed to develop and
manage plantations on common lands?
The State of Maharashtra has focused on the creation of village woodlots
on village grazing lands and used village panchayats to manage the
plantations. The village woodlots are important for the landless households
because the other component of the social forestry programme in Maharashtra farm forestry - only benefits landholders.
The case studies of watershed management in Sukhomajri village near
Chandigarh and the work of afforestation by the Chipko Movement present two
examples where entire communities have been involved in the afforestation of
the commons, through the creation of new community organisations and equitable
sharing of the benefits of afforestation.
The village of Sukhomajri and the villages in the high Himalayas where
the Chipko Movement is working in both instances have relatively homogeneous
societies where poverty is shared comparatively equally by all. In the fifth
case study,
therefore, we have chosen an area with strong
social
stratification and where afforestation work has exclusively involved one
lower-caste community. This case study deals with afforestation in the Bahl
region of Gujarat by co-operatives of landless and small farmers belonging to
one caste group in the village.
Notes
1 Anil Agarwal and Bhubanesh Bhatt:
Firewood in the cities I and II
(New Delhi, Centre for Science and Environment, 1984).
2
Studies on the Ungra village agricultural
H.I. Somashekar, et al.:
An imal drawn carts and transport (Bang a1o r e, ASTRA,
ecosystems, Part II:
Indian Institute of Science; mimeographed).
3 Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre:
kattumaram? (Madras, Nov. 1983; mimeographed).
8445d
How
many
hectares
per
14 4
The state of
Anil Agarwal, Ravi Chopra and Kalpana Sharma (ed):
India's environment - 1982 (New Delhi, Centre for Science and Environment),
p. 49.
Impact of Bastar forestry project on
5 Government of Madhya Pradesh:
tribal economy (Bhopal, Tribal and Harijan Welfare Department; mimeographed).
6
The need of
"Milk cooperatives and tribal poverty:
J.M. Heredero:
education and management", in Social Action (New Delhi), July-Nov. 1983,
pp. 285-306.
Agricultural statistics at a glance (New
7 Government of India:
____________________
Delhi, Directorate of Economics and Statistics Department of Agriculture and
Co-operation, Ministry of Agriculture, Apr. 1986), p. 72.
8
ibid.
9
"Common property resources and rural
N.S. Jodha:
Economic
and Political Weekly (Bombay),
in
regions of India",
pp. 1169-1181.
Community
10 World Gujarat
Bank:
____
mission (Washington), p. 27.
Forestry
Project
poor in dry
5 July 1986,
Mid-term
review
11
A short review report on the impact of
Government of Karnaka:
land
use in Kolar and Bangalore districts
forestry
programme
on
social
(Bangalore, Bureau of Economics and Statistics, 1984).
12 World Bank: West Bengal
mission (Washington), table 1.
1 3
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ibid., table 2.
Social
Forestry Project
Mid-term
review
*
15
CHAPTER II
CASE STUDY:
■S
FARM FORESTRY IN WEST BENGAL
West Bengal has 1.18 million hectares of forest land, that is, 13 per
cent of the total land area of the state. Per capita forest land area is only
0.02 ha, however - the lowest in the country.1 Forest land actually under
trees is even smaller, only 7.8 per cent of the state’s land area according to
a 1982 mapping of the forest cover based on satellite imagery.2
This
forest-poor state, none the less, has the largest concentration of
forest-based industries in the country even though studies undertaken in 1965
and 1975 showed that the state forests could supply only 10 per cent of the
total needs of these industries.3
Subject to this enormous pressure,
forests are bound to suffer, as are the poor whose basic needs for wood to
cook and fodder for their animals are obtained from these forests.
Various energy use estimates for the state put annual firewood
consumption at about 8 million tonnes. According to official figures, the
annual supply of firewood from government forests plus estimated illegal
removals account for only 0.7 million tonnes.44 In West Bengal, especially
in the dry lateritic zones, the energy shortage is truly frightening. Poor
women and children have no option but to spend hours foraging for twigs, weeds
and branches and now increasingly sweep the forest floor to collect leaves to
burn.
With a sizeable area lying waste and a poor rural population starved of
basic needs of fuel and fodder, the state has since the early eighties started
a number of forestry programmes. The largest of these is the Social Forestry
Project funded by the World Bank.
The Social Forestry Project
The Social Forestry Project started in 1981 and planned to afforest
93,000 ha. or about 1 per cent of the total land area of the state, by 1987.
The project aims to increase supplies of fuelwood, fodder, small timber,
poles, bamboo and fruits to meet the subsistence needs of the rural
population. Within six years. the project hoped to establish 6,000 ha of
village woodlots, 15,000 ha of improved degraded forests, 20,000 ha of strip
plantations and 52,000 ha of farm forestry on private land, and to set up
10,000 smokeless chulhas in homes. The total project cost is US$43 million.5
Every component except the village woodlot scheme had surpassed its
targets by the fifth planting year - 1985-86. By then, an area of 90,229 ha
had been afforested through the various schemes. 6
The farm forestry component has been the most successful.
successful.
Under this
scheme, privately owned wastelands have been taken up for afforestation.
Table 2 shows the progress in the farm forestry programme in West Bengal. By
the end of 1985-86, about 55,000 ha of land had been afforested in the state,
about one-and-a-half times the target set for this period.7 Farm forestry as in other parts of India - involves planting of trees on private lands by
landholders with assistance from the Social Forestry Wing of the Forest
Department. The West Bengal farm forestry component has three schemes.
The first component entails the distribution of free seedlings with a
cash incentive, This scheme is designed primarily to encourage poor farmers
with small holding of wastelands to take on afforestation, Unlike most other
states, in the West Bengal scheme there are strict limits on the size of
8445d
16
sothat only smallfarmers will get
landholding which canbenefit,
Incentives are available only to farmers with less than 2 ha of
encouraged.
land and taking up to 750seedlings (equivalent to 0.5 ha of plantation).
Another stipulation is that land for plantations has to be classified as
wasteland to qualify
for
the cash
incentives.8 In
many cases, this
wasteland had been obtained by the poor under earlier land reform programmes.
Table 2.
Progress in farm forestry programme in West Bengal,
targets and achievements, 1981-851
r
Year
Target
(ha)
Actual
(ha)
Actual as per cent
of target
1981- 82
1982- 83
1983- 84
1984- 85
Apr.-Dec. 19852
1 460
4 280
9 040
10 740
12 240
2 902
6 360
11 442
15 157
17 973
199
149
127
141
147
Mar. 1981-Dec. 1985
37 760
54 834
145
West Bengal Social_______
Forestry Project:
1 Government of West Bengal:
____________________________________
Monitoring
information series No. 3/85, (Calcutta, Monitoring and Evaluation
Cell, Social Forestry Wing, Forest Directorate, May 1985), p. 1.
Social Forestry Project - West Bengal:
2 Government of West Bengal:
______________________________
Highlights on progress (1981-85), (Calcutta, Monitoring and Evaluation Cell,
Social Forest Wing, Forest Directorate).
The cash incentive amounts to a total of Rs. 300 for half a ha of
This cash
plantation, given in instalments over a period of three years,
payment is partly to cover the farmer's labour costs.
In the first year,
Rs. 125 is given in kind in the form of fertilisers and insecticides,
In the
second year, Rs.0.10 is given for each surviving seedling up to Rs.75, and in
the third year an incentive of Rs.0.14 is given for each surviving sapling up
to a limit of Rs.100. Labour for land levelling, pit digging and plantation
as well as protection is invested by the landowner. Over a period of three
years the total sum works out to Rs.0.03 a day paid to the landowner for
afforestation.
The second scheme tries to tie together land reform with afforestation.
Under this scheme, a total of 10,000 ha are to be allotted to poor landless
families by the Land Reforms Commissioner for the purpose of planting trees.
State-owned wasteland is to be allocated to the landless in small parcels of
up to 0.5 ha.
In this case, rights over the land are given to the landless
family, not just the rights to the produce from the trees. Families also get
free seedling and cash incentives similar to those in the first scheme.
The third scheme is a standard farm forestry programme.
The social
forestry directorate distributes seedlings free of charge to the farmers.
There is no restriction on farm size, but the farmers do not get any cash
subsidy.
8445d
17
Thus, under farm forestry, an attempt is being made in West Bengal to tie
together the distribution of state-owned, non-arable wastelands to the
landless poor and afforestation. This strategy ensures that the poor benefit
directly from afforestation and that the landless are involved in the
programme.
It is this linkage with distribution of land to the landless,
either explicitly for afforestation, or under earlier land reform programmes,
which is the crucial difference in afforestation in West Bengal as compared to
other states of India.
The State of West Bengal has a sizeable area of unproductive land. The
forest department puts the figure for both private and government wastelands
at 17 per cent of the land area of the state.99 Through the enforcement of
two Acts, the West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act of 1953 and the West Bengal
Land Reforms Act of 1955, the state has acquired large areas of what are
called ’’vested” lands - lands which can be distributed under the land reform
programme. These vested lands comprise both agricultural and non-agricultural
lands.
The Government claims that the vested non-agricultural lands have not
been distributed, but government assessments have found that portions of the
’’vested” agricultural land are also unfit for agriculture.9
In fact, this
is the rule rather than the exception, especially in districts with expanses
Thus, large tracts of
of lateritic land, according to some administrators,
wastelands are either vested with the state waiting to be redistributed to
poor peasants, or have already been distributed to poor landowners who find
little use for it. The Government of West Bengal had by 1984 distributed
about 0.3 million ha of agricultural land to about 1.5 million people - an
average of only 0.2 ha per beneficiary. 10
Many of these lands have never
been cultivated because they are too marginal. In Paldhari village (Midnapore
district) for instance, poor Lodha tribals have had land rights for the last
15 years, but the land is too marginal for agriculture. The tribals have
largely continued their lives as agricultural labourers, often migrating on a
seasonal basis over long distances to look for work.
Farm forestry is a technical solution which enables the poor to use these
wastelands. In the three districts of Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia, which
have almost 0.3 million ha of unirrigated, lateritic wastelands, the farm
In Nepura village (Midnapore) the
forestry programme has had many takers,
mini-gold
rush.
Out of a total of 2,000
planting of trees has started a
1,500
families
have
planted their meagre
families in ten villages, almost
landholdings with trees.
There are really two reasons for this great interest in farm forestry in
the lateritic tracts of West Bengal. First, as explained above, a lot of poor
peasants possess small pieces of land which are very poor for agricultural
purposes and therefore lie idle most of the time.
Second, the massive
destruction of forests has led to very high prices of poles and timber in the
urban markets of West Bengal.
Reasons for planting trees
People in West Bengal are clearly planting trees for the financial
benefits. According to the Forest Department figures given in table 3, in the
four districts with major social forestry activity, almost 90 per cent of the
trees planted are eucalyptus and Acacia
auriculiformis.11
Both are
non-browsable exotics which do not provide fodder but fetch a good price in
the market. On average, 1 ha of degraded, non-irrigated land planted with
eucalyptus promises to yield Rs.45,000 at the end of six years, or as much as
Rs.7,500 annually. In Nepura village, for example, a schoolmaster sold 1,500
8445d
18
eucalyptus trees for a net price of Rs.56,000 or Rs.37 per tree in just five
years.
Under agriculture, the crop yield would be extremely uncertain and
would never be worth more than a few thousand rupees a year.
Table 3.
Species planted in four major districts.
West Bengal Social Forestry Project (per cent)
District
1.
2.
3.
4.
Bankura
Purulia
Birbhum
Midnapur
Average
Source:
Eucalyptus
Acacia
auriculiformis
Fruit and
other species
74
14
62
80
15
84
28
12
11
2
10
8
57.5
34.75
7.75
Government of West Bengal:
Evaluation:
An interim report. West
Bengal, Social Forestry Project (Calcutta, Monitoring and Evaluation
Cell, Social Forestry Wing, Forest Directorate, Dec. 1983), p. 20.
These non-browsable trees are also popular because the land is so
degraded that growing any other species would be slow and difficult.
In
addition, eucalyptus and Acacia auriculiformis need little investment of time
for protection from grazing.
In West Bengal, the Social Forestry Directorate promotes what is called
"group farm forestry".
While in farm forestry, farmers are encouraged to
plant on their individual lands, in group farm forestry, instead of a single
plot coming under trees, a number of families with land in contiguous
stretches together take up the planting of trees.
Group forestry is
convenient for the small landowners because protection of one large tract of
land is easier than protecting many small pieces of land.
It would be a
mistake though to call this "community forestry". The land and the produce is
individually owned, and only the management is done on a group basis.
Group
farm forestry thus allows plantation owners free time to continue their lives
as agricultural labourers and even to migrate to other parts of the state to
look for work.
In the drier district of Purulia, large tracts have been planted with
Acacia auriculiformis using the group farm forestry approach.
This tree has
been promoted by the Social Forestry Directorate - and apparently is liked by
the people - because it sheds large quantities of leaves, which are used as
cooking fuel. No tree owner wants to use the wood for cooking though since it
is all destined for the urban market.
’’Who wants to burn currency notes?"
asked one peasant.
The people of Deuli - a village in interior Purulia - have had to evolve
an interesting system of group management to protect their plantations.
Because of the extreme shortage of firewood, women in this village had to walk
6 to 7 km every day to collect leaves and twigs from distant forest lands for
burning.
Against this backdrop, almost all villagers in this multi-caste
village have put their private wastelands under trees. These trees now stand
out in a barren landscape and are therefore valued not just by the villagers
8445d
19
of Deuli but also by villagers from neighbouring areas.
This has made
protection against theft by outsiders almost impossible.
The villagers of
Deuli therefore decided that only one day a week on Sunday would people be
allowed into their plantations. If anyone was found in the plantation, even
in his or her own plantation, on any other day of the week, the fine would be
one male goat. This checked entry into the plantation. But to make sure that
all villagers would get some benefit from the plantations, the fallen leaves
were turned into a community resource which could be taken by anyone from the
village or even from outside of the village. The twigs, branches and grass
This management
under the trees, however, belonged only to the landowner,
approach has greatly helped to reduce any emerging tensions.
Farm forestry has been very successful in many states of India but has been
criticised for mainly benefiting large farmers and the urban market rather
than meeting subsistence fuel and fodder needs of the rural poor.
But the
West Bengal project has a distinct bias towards the poor and marginal farmer.
Firstly, the programme stipulates that 61 per cent of the financial allocation
for farm forestry go to farmers owning less than 2 ha of unirrigated land.
Cash benefits are given only to farmers planting not more than half a
hectare.
In the first two years, in fact, 72 per cent of the total
participants owned less than 2 ha of land. Table 4 shows the landholding
patterns of participants in the four major districts in the project.
The
average number of seedlings planted by the farmers over the two years was 282,
indicating that the area planted by each farmer was small, about one-fourth of
a hectare.12
Table 4.
Landholding patterns of participants in four major
districts, West Bengal Social Forestry Project (per cent)
District
1.
2.
3.
4.
Bankura
Purulia
Birbhum
Midnapore
Source:
2 ha or less
More than 2 ha
49
91
73
78
51
9
27
22
Government of West Bengal: Evaluation: An interim report,
West Bengal Social Forestry Project (West Bengal, Monitoring and
Evaluation Cell, Social Forestry Wing, Forest Directorate,
Dec. 1983), p. 26.
Erstwhile landless household included in land distribution programmes are
not the only beneficiaries of the farm forestry programme in the state.
Achievement has in fact been highest in the third scheme of farm forestry,
which does not restrict the size of landholdings of the beneficiary.
Still,
in contrast with other states, landless and marginal farmers have been
involved in a far greater proportion in West Bengal.
Another crucial difference from other states is that in West Bengal the
lands being planted are mostly not cultivable lands, so cereals or cash crops
are not being displaced.
In West Bengal, the lands being used for farm
forestry are mostly wastelands. Almost 60 per cent of the hands under farm
forestry are in districts with extensive wastelands namely, Birbhum, Bankura,
8445d
20
Midnapore and Purulia.
A detailed study contrasting the alluvial and
lateritic regions of Midnapore highlights this difference.
In the lateritic
tracts, the majority of participants planted trees on wastelands, while in the
alluvial plains, farmers preferred to plant trees on bunds and boundaries,
showing that land is obviously scarce. The species also differ in the two
areas.
In the lateritic wastelands, almost 70 per cent of the trees planted
are eucalyptus, and the rest are Acacia auriculiformis.
In the alluvial
plains, the share of eucalyptus drops to 20 per cent, and the favourite trees
are subabul (leucaena), karanj, sal and arjun.27
r
Choice of species
Despite this success, however, the farm forestry programme in West Bengal
meets the basic fuel and fodder needs of the rural population only to a
limited extent.
Eucalyptus
and Acacia auriculiformis are listed by the
Forest Department as firewood trees, but the wood of these trees is, in fact,
too valuable for the poor to burn.
In a state where industries are starved
for forest-based raw materials and wood prices are soaring, the poor woman’s
stove does not stand a chance against the buying power of these industries.
The poor who plant trees can, however, meet a part of their energy needs by
keeping the barks, twigs and leaves of the trees they grow for household
consumption.
The main problem with West Bengal's farm forestry programme arises out of
The main
its complete neglect of the issue of increasing fodder supply,
species chosen - eucalyptus and Acacia auriculiformis - are entirely
non-browsable.
In a state with a large animal population and an acute
In
West
shortage of fodder, this neglect has wide ecological ramifications.
In many areas.
Bengal has little revenue or panchayat land left for grazing,
the only large tracts of "common land" available for grazing are forest
lands. These state-owned forest lands are the mainstay of most villages in
the lateritic and hill areas. People use these forest lands to collect twigs
and leaves for fuel and to graze their animals. To the extent that private
fallow land comes under farm forestry with non-browsable species, the grazing
pressure will remain or even increase on the existing forest lands, which will
be further degraded, Thus, whereas the farm foresty programme in West Bengal
has evolved an innovative approach by linking afforestation with its ongoing
land reform programme. it is not yet clear whether the species chosen are
promoting ecologically sound land use in areas where forest lands are already
under heavy pressure.
Notes
1 Government of West Bengal:
Social Forestry
(Calcutta, Forest Directorate, Oct. 1980), p. 8.
Project
West Bengal
2 National Remote Sensing Agency:
Mapping of forest cover in India
from satellite imagery, 1972-75 and 1980-82 (Hyderabad, Department of Space,
Government of India, Dec. 1983), pp. 5-6.
3
Government of West Bengal:
op. c i t., p. 15.
4
Social
Forestry Project
West
Bengal,
ibid. p. 16.
5 World Bank:
West Bengal Social Forestry Project: Staff appraisal
report (Washington, Education and Agricultural Institutions Division, South
Asia Projects Department, Sep. 1981).
8445d
21
Government of West Bengal: Social Forestry Project - West Bengal:
Highlights on progress (1981-85) (Calcutta, Monitoring and Evaluation Cell,
Social Forestry Directorate, West Bengal, 1985-86).
6
7 ibid.
*
West Bengal Social Forestry Project, op. cit., p. 14.
8
World Bank:
9
Government of West Bengal:
Social Forestry Project, op. cit., p. 30.
10 Government of West Bengal: Seventh workshop on land reforms: Field
problems, suggested actions and government decisions (West Bengal, Board of
Revenue, 1985), p. 26.
11 Anon:
’’Land reforms in West Bengal” in West Bengal
Feb. 1985), pp. 63-66.
(Calcutta,
16
1 2
Government of West Bengal:
Evaluation:
An interim report. West
Bengal Social Forestry Project (Calcutta Monitoring and Evaluation Cell,
Social Forestry Wing, Forest Directorate, Dec. 1983), p. 20.
1 3
1 4
ibid., pp. 25-27.
Government of West Bengal: Field testing of an operational guide to
the monitoring and evaluation of social forestry in India (Calcutta,
Monitoring and Evaluation Cell, Social Forestry Directorate, Feb. 1985).
8445d
- 22 CHAPTER III
CASE STUDY:
VILLAGE WOODLOT SCHEME IN MAHARASHTRA
The villages of Maharashtra, like those in other parts of the country,
face an acute shortage of cooking energy. Official estimates put the extent
of deforestation at 207,000 ha, or 9 per cent of the forest area in the last
20 years, which has left the state with only 12 per cent of its land area
under forests.1
The National Council for Applied Economic Research has
estimated that the state’s rural areas consume an equivalent of 17 million
cubic metres of firewood every year, while the State’s reserved forests
produce only some 1.5 million cubic metres - a bare 9 per cent of the state’s
annual requirements of household energy. The rest of the energy consumed is
met from cow dung, crop residues and twigs, branches and weeds on panchayat,
revenue and private lands, and desperate acts like digging out the roots of
sugar-cane to burn.
The situation of availability of fodder is equally dismal, Maharashtra
has a high livestock density, and the fodder requirement was estimated in
1965-66 to be 107 million tonnes annually.2 Production of green fodder is
only a fraction of the total requirement, There are no accurate accounts of
where animals graze, but one government report has estimated that 20 per cent
of the total livestock of the state graze in government forests.3
The
majority of the poor and the majority of the livestock most probably meet
their fodder needs from common grazing lands in the state.
There are 1.5
million hectares of permanent grazing lands (or panchayat lands) in
Maharashtra, and given their importance in meeting basic needs of the poor,
their management is vital. Permanent pastures and other grazing lands are
lands which have been demarcated for the exclusive purpose of meeting the
needs of village people.
These lands are resources accessible to whole
village communities and on which no single individual has exclusive property
rights. Under the direct control of the panchayats, these are the true common
lands in the country.
Others, like non-cultivable wastelands (under the
control of the Revenue Department) and forest lands (under the control of the
Forest Department), are common lands by default.
The social forestry project
The social forestry project in Maharashtra is made up largely of two
components - forestry on private lands and forestry on panchayat lands. The
project envisaged planting of trees on 18.5 ha of land in each village, with
about half the trees being planted on panchayat lands and the remaining half
on private lands. The project aims to cover 4,300 villages between 1982 and
1990, that is, 76,000 ha spread over 11 per cent of the total inhabited
villages of the state.4
The implementing agency for the project is the Maharashtra State
Horticulture and Social Forestry Department, and the project has been funded
by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The component envisaging planting of trees on panchayat lands essentially
aims at creating village woodlots, or block plantations, meant for the
collective use of the entire village. Under the scheme, the Forest Department
obtains panchayat land with the consent of the village panchayat, and bears
the total expenditure incurred in planting, protection and maintenance for
three years. At the end of three years, the plantations are to be handed over
to the village panchayat. The panchayat is from then on to be responsible for
protecting and maintaining the plantation and for harvesting and distributing
8445d
- 23 -
the produce to the villagers. The mode of distribution has been left to the
panchayats to decide, but the panchayats are to be told that priority must be
given to the landless and small and marginal farmers. The project document
states that at the end of eight years, when the project comes to an end, all
the plantations are to be managed and operated by village communities, and
these plantations will be able to meet 20 per cent of the current firewood
needs of the participating villages.
The scheme's particular importance is that while afforestation on private
land only benefits landed villagers, village woodlots in principle should be
able to benefit all villagers, including landless and small and marginal
landowning households who suffer from an acute shortage of fuel and fodder
needs. Therefore, in the choice of species to be planted under the village
woodlot component, the major objective is to plant trees and grasses that will
meet fodder and fuel needs.
Planting trees in the drought-prone region of Marathwada (in central
planting work
work has been
major portion of
of the planting
Maharashtra), where the
the major
For
instance,
in 1986 the
undertaken, has turned out to be a challenge.
that
water
was
not easily
that water was not
drought in Aurangabaddistrict
district was
was so acute
One
after
another
the
wells
used for
available even for creating nurseries,
watering plants in nurseries were requisitioned by district authorities for
conditions, the
drinking water.
To tackle rainfall failure and poor soil conditions,
Forest Department has had to undertake <elaborate soil and moisture
conservation works. The plantations, with all these efforts,, have survived
reasonably well.
The Forest Department has protected these plantations by employing local
villagers to guard the trees.
The total amount spent in protecting each
hectare is Rs. 1,170, or 18 per cent of the total expenditure on the plantation
over the first three years.5
The Forest Department in the three years from 1982 to 1985 planted
14,723 ha of village woodlots in a total of 2,160 villages, This meant that
on average 6.8 ha were planted in each village instead of the 9 ha planned at
the stage of project formulation, as shown in table 5.
Table 5.
Progress in Maharashtra in village woodlots,
villages and area covered, 1982-85
Number of villages
covered
Area covered (ha)
Target
Actual
Target
Actual
540
800
800
2 140
540
810
810
2 160
2 355
5 730
6 950
15 035
2 639
5 441
6 643
14 723
Year
1982- 83
1983- 84
1984- 85
1982-85
Source:
8445d
Average area
covered per
village (ha)
4.9
6.7
8.2
6.8
Development
<(USAID):
International
Agency
for
United
States
Maharashtra Social Forestry Project - Mid-term evaluationi report
(Washington, 1985), p. 45.
24 Reluctance of panchayats to manage woodlots
By 1986, there were 540 villages where village woodlots were three years
old and were hence ready to be handed over to the panchayats.
Here the
problems in the project really started as panchayat after panchayat refused to
take over the management of these plantations.
The reluctance of the
panchayats stemmed from reasons meshed in with village politics, settlement
patterns and finances.
An obvious hesitation arose out of the daunting
problems posed by the need to protect the plants.
Firstly, the panchayats argued that protection of plants required a unity
of purpose amongst the various village factions on the issue, and the
panchayats felt unable to forge such a unity. It was even feared that the
village factions opposing those elected to the panchayat might destroy the
plantation by stealth out of sheer vendetta.
Secondly, the panchayat leaders argued that the panchayat would have to
hire a guard to protect the plantation as the Forest Department had done, but
the panchayat’s financial position was too poor to undertake this, In Murgaon
village (Ahmednagar district), for instance, the panchayat has an annual
income of only Rs.5,000 to Rs.10,000 and could not spend the Rs.2,000-odd
needed to hire a guard to protect the village woodlot.
Thirdly, many panchayats covered several hamlets/villages.
In these
cases, though the panchayat land near one village/hamlet had been planted, the
panchayat itself was often dominated by people from another village/hamlet .
The villagers belonging to the village/hamlet near the plantation were
therefore afraid that they would not derive any benefit from the plantation,
and in any case did not want to share the income of ’’their” plantation with
the other villages/hamlets in the same panchayat.
Fourthly, the panchayat leaders argued that the panchayat had no power to
prosecute offending villagers as did the Forest Department. For all these
reasons, therefore, the panchayats suggested that either the Forest Department
pay the panchayats the cost of hiring a guard for all those years till the
plantations were ready to be felled, or that the Forest Department simply
manage the plantations itself until they mature.
In Dhorigaon village (in Aurangabad district), the panchayat wanted the
Forest Department not to hand over the trees, but rather to cut the trees
itself, sell the wood, and give the panchayat the money.
In Erandeshwar
village (Parbhani district), a panchayat leader said, ’’Why do you want to hand
over charge to us? The Social Forestry Department has American money and a
trained staff. Give us charge at the time of auctioning the produce and we
will decide what to do.”6
Vagpur village (Ahmednagar district) sent word to the Forest Department
to take back the charge of the plantation which the panchayat had taken over.
In Aurangabad district’s Tisgaon village (where the plantation was to be
handed over next year), the panchayat has already stated that it does not want
to manage the trees.
The villagers in Tisgaon said trees would be cut
illegally and result in fights in the village.
They had visited a
neighbouring village where within six months of the handing over of the
plantation, the trees had disappeared. According to the villagers, wood was
so scarce that protection of even private trees was a problem. ”If we don't
protect our trees for a few days, they are cut. There are occasional clashes
over firewood in the village. Then how can we protect what is not ours?”,
said one villager.
8445d
- 25
In Murgaon village, the panchayat took charge of the plantation. But
within a fortnight, villagers who were forced to take a circuitous route
around the plantation in order to get to their fields had cut a path through
the plantation for their bullock carts. Although these villagers never cut a
path during the three years that the Forest Department protected the
plantations, the panchayat did not want to take up a fight on this issue with
the individuals responsible for destroying a part of the plantation.
*
Only in village Dhorkin (Aurangabad district) did the panchayat express
interest in taking over the village woodlot when it was ready to be handed
over. At that time, the social forestry plantation was only two years old and
would take another year to be handed over. The Dhorkin panchayat was already
managing a 20 ha plantation which was 15 years old and would take another 5
years to mature. The plantation had been created under an earlier scheme of
the Government. The panchayat was spending Rs.250 each month protecting the
plantation and waiting for the eventual benefit. But Dhorkin has an unusually
rich panchayat. It has an annual revenue of about Rs.60,000 coming from taxes
and rents. The village is situated along a major road and has many shops,
including a cinema hall.
All this has meant that the forest department now has to protect small, 5
to 10 ha tree plots, scattered over a vast land area. The Forest Department
is trying to persuade the panchayats to take over responsibility, and has
recently started to try to persuade the panchayats long before the date of
transfer. Meanwhile, however, it has reconciled itself to the management of
these plantations for periods longer than three years. This has increased the
cost of these plantations. Instead of the original cost estimate of Rs.4,500
per hectare spread over three years, the cost has turned out to be Rs.6,581
per hectare. And now this cost is being revised to Rs.8,131 per hectare over
five years, making it a reasonably expensive investment.
Would the poor actually benefit if the management of these village
woodlots so assiduously created by the Forest Department were to be taken over
by the panchayats? Several case studies show that in most villages the
dominant interest groups monopolise the panchayat. Most development benefits,
be they oil engines, gobar gas or drinking water facilities, have been
cornered by these groups. As a result, there is mistrust among the poor in
the villages about how the benefits of these village woodlots will be
distributed, since this has been left to the panchayats to decide.
Problems of the poor
The village woodlots planted by the Forest Department so far may already
be creating problems for the poor. Panchayat lands are used extensively by
the landless and small and marginal farmers for grazing their animals. With
the planting of trees, their access to panchayat land has been restricted. No
doubt there is the hope that increased biomass productivity will bring higher
benefits later. But this promise may prove to be illusory. With increased
protection, grass starts growing rapidly and production tends to increase
multifold. Because of green fodder scarcity, this higher grass output could
potentially greatly benefit the poor. But in most cases, panchayats do not
want to develop the elaborate distribution procedures needed for equitable
distribution. They simply prefer to see the grass as a marketable commodity
and have invariably decided to auction the right to cut grass to the highest
bidder. In Pahela village (Bhandara district), the grass from the village
woodlot now goes to an individual who is in the dairy business, and the poor
are left with nothing. They now increasingly rely on government forest lands
to graze their animals and to collect fuel,
fuel. leading to greater pressures on
these forest lands.7 In Dhorkin village, too,
too. entry to the older village
8445d
26
woodlot was closed, and grass was auctioned every year. No agreement has been
worked out with the panchayats by the Forest Department regarding distribution
of the produce from the village woodlots prior to the start of the project.
It is difficult to expect government trees to become community trees overnight.
Little effort has been made under the project to involve the priority
target groups in the management of the village woodlots from the start. Even
the project’s objectives are not known or understood by many poor villagers.
In Tisgaon village, when the plantation was over two years old, women
expressed surprise when asked whether the panchayat had worked out the
The women said that
distribution of the benefits from the village woodlot.
they had always thought it was the Forest Department’s plantation from which
they would get no benefits.
There has been little involvement of the people in the choice of species
planted in the village woodlot, e.g. whether they would prefer slow-growing
fuel and fodder species or fast-growing commercial species.
A question
difficult to answer is whether increased productivity of panchayat lands
through fast-growing, commercial species like monocrops of eucalyptus would
also increase the vested interests of the panchayats in management of the
village woodlots, and if so, whether the distribution problem would not become
even more difficult. The panchayat leaders would probably then wish to obtain
the maximum benefits for themselves.
Getting panchayats to lease land to the Forest Department for creating a
village woodlot has not been an easy task. In Aurangabad district there are
instances of villages which had woodlots under older schemes like rural
fuelwood plantations, which have been destroyed over time.
The Forest
Department has had to go back to the same villages to plant new trees amongst
the old dead trees, because of problems in finding land. Kashyap Mankodi, in
a case study of Pahela village in Bhandara district, has found that panchayat
land has been encroached upon or distributed for private cultivation, but not
incorporated in land utilisation statistics.8
In some villages
the
panchayats have refused to give over land for village woodlots to the
Government, fearing loss of their grazing lands. In a few others, panchayats
have given land to the Forest Department only to get rid of encroachment, or
to keep these lands from being encroached upon.
In Erandeshwar village
(Parbhani district), the poor felt that the land had been given over to the
Forest Department for the village woodlot only to prevent its redistribution
to them.
In the same village, the powerful Maratha landowners had prevented
the poor from taking possession of land which had been officially allotted to
them. This created mistrust among the powerless poor about the intentions of
the panchayats and the Forest Department. The Forest Department, finding it
difficult to get land, has simply accepted these situations.
The crucial issue with village woodlots is a just distribution of the
benefits generated by them.
In most Maharashtra districts, soil
and
meteorological conditions are too adverse for good tree or grass growth. The
rainfall is barely 400-500 millimetres annually and the soil depth is poor.
Thus, a plantation of an average size of 6.8 ha is inadequate to meet the
needs of an entire village. This means that there is little interest in the
plantation amongst panchayat leaders and by the people. When there is little
to go around, distribution usually becomes more difficult.
The mid-term appraisal has recommended restructuring the transfer date
for the woodlots onl the basis of plantation yields, soil types and
The Forest Department will have to manage the
agro-climatic zones,
Secondly, the report has
plantations for three; to seven or more years.
Thirdly, it has
stressed involvement of the community from the outset.
recommended that the component of block or community plantations in the scheme
8445d
- 27
be reduced from 50 to 40 per cent. It is proving difficult to get community
lands for afforestation because of encroachment and grazing needs.
The
village woodlot scheme will clearly succeed or fail in the quagmire of village
politics.
Notes
1 United States Agency for International Development (USAID):
paper on Maharashtra social forestry (Washington, Aug. 1982), p. 9.
Project
2 A.R. Rajapurohit and M. Vi vekananda: Bovine feed availability and
requirement in India - A district-wise analysis (Bangalore, Agricultural
Development and Rural Transformation Unit, Institute for Social and Economic
Change, 1981).
3
Government of India: Report of the Committee for Review of Rights
and Concessions in the Forest Areas of India (New Delhi, Forest Division,
Ministry of Agriculture, Mar. 1984).
4
USAID, op. cit., pp. 3-4.
5 USAID:
Maharashtra Social Forestry
report (Washington, 1985), pp. 52-57.
Project
Mid-term
evaluation
6 Jagdish Godbole: Social forestry in Maharashtra - A case study of
Erandeshwar village, Parbhani district (India); mimeographed, p. 30.
7
Kashyap Mankodi: The Maharashtra Social Forestry Project in Bhandara
District: A tale of three villages; mimeographed, p. 30.
8445d
8
ibid., p. 17.
9
Jagdish Godbole, op. cit., p. 14.
- 28
CHAPTER IV
CASE STUDY:
WATERSHED MANAGEMENT IN SUKHOMAJRI VILLAGE (HARYANA)
The village of Sukhomajri is located in the Sivalik mountain range at the
foothills of the Himalayas. The Sivalaks being a young mountain range, are
susceptible to severe erosion, which has been accentuated by the destruction
of the forest cover over the last century. Old accounts of this area speak of
drastic changes from 1815 onwards, after the British defeated the Gurkhas in
the lower hills and came to control the hills and their resources.
Forest
exploitation started from 1840, with the growth of the railway-building
industry across Northern India. Forests soon gave way to clay-covered banks
and boulders in the upper catchments of the rivers.
The threat posed by this massive erosion was so evident that the British
as early as 1902 passed the country's first legislation to control erosion,
called the Land Preservation Act. The Act demarcated and closed land from
grazing as well as making provisions for various soil conservation measures
such as countour bunding, gully plugging and tree plantation.
From 1934,
improved grazing lands were "voluntarily" closed under the above Act or under
the Indian Forest Act. About 80,000 acres of badly gullied Sivalik foothills
had already been closed to grazing by that year. The Government at that time
also responded with other measures, including the management of wastelands in
the villages by the newly formed Cho Reclamation Co-operative Societies. The
Forest Department and a special staff of co-operative inspectors provided
technical help to these societies. In spite of these efforts, the condition
of the Sivaliks and its people have only worsened. The National Commission on
Agriculture (NCA) stressed again in 1976 the enormity of the soil erosion
problem in the Sivaliks and recommended soil conservation measures. According
to the NCA's estimates, 0.26 million hectares of fertile land in Punjab had
been devastated. The main reason was that the thrust of all efforts, by both
the British and the Indian Governments, had been to curtail grazing by animals
against the will of the people, an approach that was doomed to fail.
Siltation of Sukhna lake
The city of Chandigarh in north India is surrounded by the Sivalik
mountain ranges which are administered by the two States of Haryana and
Punj ab. These hills are so degraded that the artifical lake Sukhna, which is
situated at the edge of the hills and provides the water supply for
Chandigarh, was lost to mud and gravel within just 15 years. The lake was
silting at the rate of 3 per cent annually and had lost 60 per cent of its
storage capacity by the early seventies.1 Forest lands consisted of 76 per
cent of the total catchment of the lake and totalled 3,214 ha.2 Studies in
the area found that on average, 150 tonnes per hectare per year of sediment
were being deposited in the lake from these degraded forest lands.3
By the early seventies the city administration was exploring the option
of digging yet another lake to augment Chandigarh's water supply. Then in
1974, the Chandigarh Centre of the Central Soil and Water Conservation
Research and Training Institute (CSWCRTI) was asked to look into the problem
of watershed management of the area. The city authorities, however, regarded
tackling the problem at the source, a massive catchment area, with scepticism.
Undaunted the research centre spent a number of days surveying the
catchment. The head of the Centre, P. R. Mishra, and his colleagues walked
from the lake to the start of the gully heads, Their survey found that 80 per
cent of the erosion was from the higher catch ent area and was concentrated in
8445d
29
pockets of severe erosion. Of the six gully heads contributing to the silting
of the lake, Kansal cho was the largest, and at the start of the cho, they
found the village of Sukhomajri. The forest area of this village, 15 kms
upstream from the Sukhna lake, had contributed a great deal to the silting of
the lake.
Environmental poverty in Sukhomajri village
*
This small village had a total population of 455 in 1974.
The 59
families were mostly Gujjars (shepherds). It was thus a homogeneous village
from a caste point of view. Most people in the village - 85 per cent of the
total - were illiterate and dependent on agriculture and animal husbandry.
The total land area in the village was 120 ha, of which 100 ha was under crops
and 20 ha was abadi or wasteland. But of the 100 ha cultivated, only 52.3 ha
were owned by individuals and the rest - a little less than half - was
communal panchayat land, which had over the years been encroached by the
villagers for cultivation. The average landholding in the village was only
0.88 ha. Out of the total of 59 families, 37 owned less than 1 ha and 20
families onwed between 1 and 2 ha of unirrigated land, only two families owned
more than 2 ha of land.
There was no source of irrigation in the village. The annual rainfall of
1,137 millimetres was received almost entirely during the four monsoon months
and lead to heavy soil erosion.
Because of small landholdings and low
productivity, farmers of Sukhomajri were forced steadily to move onto inferior
wastelands for cultivation. Cultivation had started even on steep slopes,
exposing the land to further erosion. In 1968, several acres of land had
plunged 40 to 50 feet into a deep gorge at one end of the village, and since
then the precipice of the gorge had been moving closer to the village,
destroying cultivated fields each year. Given the marginal quality of the
soils and the lack of irrigation, yields were meagre. Average yields of wheat
and maize, grown on relatively better lands, was only 7 to 12 quintals per
hectare. The poverty of agriculture forced the villagers to keep a large
number of animals. Total livestock population in the village in 1974 was 411,
of which 206 were goats. The village faced an acute shortage of fodder, and
in most years had to import wheat straw from other villages. 4
In their bid for survival, the villagers of Sukhomajri made intensive use
The watershed - legally, forest and
of the watershed of Sukhna lake.
panchayat land - had long been demarcated as government property and the
people of Sukhomajri had only restricted use rights. They consequently had no
interest in protecting the watershed.
In fact, one of the main reasons for
cultivating the steep slopes, in spite of low returns, was to obtain property
rights over panchayat land. Animals were left to graze on this land, which
was by the 1970s highly degraded producing only a few quintals of grass per
hectare. The fuel needs of the village also came from this forest land. With
life becoming impossible in the village, villagers were fast joining the
stream of urban industrial migrants. By 1974, about 67 per cent of the adult
male population had found employment in Chandigarh city or in the nearby
cement factory.
P.R. Mishra and his colleagues at CSWCRTI identified this village and its
catchment as their starting point in controlling the siltation of the lake.
Measurement of erosion at Sukhomajri showed that the catchment area of the
village alone lost as much as 900 tonnes of silt per hectare every year.
Despite the severity of the problem, the villagers greeted the Centre’s
proposals for soil conservation works with antagonism and hostility, fearing
the loss of their grazing lands. One villager told Mishra, ’’The people of
Chandigarh are very rich. We will continue to send mud and they will continue
8445d
30 to remove it. We are poor and have no other way to survive but to graze our
animals and get some milk."
In the first year of soil conservation work, people continued to take
their animals to graze in the watershed, rendering the work of the soil
scientists useless.
Soil conservation structures were destroyed by the
villagers and disappeared overnight. Check dams were broken, and brushwood
dams - piles of wood and twigs placed horizontally between two wooden pegs to
burn, The CSWCRTI
check erosion - were uprooted and the wood taken home to burn.
team doggedly continued work. An entire package for sediment control was
devised, many soil conservation structures like staggered contour trenches, a
series of check dams and grade stabilisers were built, and trees were
planted. But grazing continued, and hence so did the destruction of their
team's work.
Water management attempts
In 1976, the CSWCRTI scientists built a small earthen dam to prevent
further erosion of the watershed and fields by diverting water into a
reservoir. This structure controlled a gully which was about 15 m deep; in
just one year agricultural land 10 m in width had turned into a gully 10 m
deep. The reservoir not only salvaged the agricultural land, but also saved
water. This was the turning point for the project.
The following year - 1977 - was a bad year for the village. The rains
failed and the wheat crop was withering, The villagers approached the soil
This
scientists for permission to use the water in the reservoir,
water not only saved the crops of
supplemental irrigation from the stored
;
villagers close to the dam site, but even improved yields from 12 to 25
quintals per hectare.
At that time, the potential of the project became clear to both the
villagers and the Centre scientists.
That same year Daulat Ram, an
enterprising villager, showed the CSWCRTI staff another good site for a dam this time an irrigation dam and not just a soil conservation structure. A
second dam was built in early 1978 with assistance from the Ford Foundation.
The dam had a catchment of 9.12 ha and a total command area of 16.14 ha.5
An underground pipeline was laid to take water to the fields, and undulating
terrain was levelled in order to maximise the benefits from irrigation, with
farmers sharing the cost of levelling.
So great was the felt need and
perceived benefits that one farmer sold two goats on the spot to pay for the
work. The only condition for the use of the water was that villagers had to
stop taking their animals to graze in the watershed. Since their own vested
interest in the dam was dependent on this prerequisite, the assumption was
that the grazing would stop.
None the less the grazing continued. The team from the Ford Foundation
and CSWCRTI soon found that this newly created wealth from improved
agriculture had in fact only created further divisions in the village. When
Madhu Sarin, a social worker employed by the Ford Foundation, asked the women
about the benefits of the water from the dam, she was told bluntly, "What
water? We don’t get any water.
It is given to a few and that also in
exchange for a bottle of liquor." The new water available had not only
benefited merely a few household, but had also led to corruption in the
management of the resource. Further investigation showed that cultivable land
in the village was divided into two parts by the village road, and that the
water conveyance system benefited only the land on one side of the road.
Since only half the farm households had land within the natural command area
of the system, only half the village was prospering, increasing inequality in
8445d
31
the village.
Secondly, to get the maximum benefits from the water, a few
farmers had started to irrigate high water-consuming crops like paddy and
sugar- cane, even though the project was only based on provision for
supplemental irrigation.
Furthermore, the water was distributed through a
functionary of the Government stationed in the village, who had started taking
bribes in exchange for providing the precious water.
As a result, tensions started to mount. Villagers sabotaged anti-erosion
In the drought of
efforts by taking their animals to graze in the watershed.
The
unirrigated
maize
crop
perished,
while the
1979, events reached a head,
the
dam
survived.
At
a
village
meeting,
Sarin
crops with irrigation from
found that women were extremely resentful. A woman from a family not getting
any water said she would rather see the dam break and threatened to take her
cattle to the dam with the intention of sabotage.6
The team realised that if the benefits of irrigation water - a common
resource - reached only a few, then only a few would have a vested interest in
If the watershed was to be protected
the protection of the resource.
effectively, then the entire community which used the watershed for grazing
would have to be given an equal share in the resources of the watershed.
Resolving fundamental equity issues
These problems raised fundamental issues of equity, the basis of water
distribution and the creation of community organisations to manage village
resources.
Traditionally, irrigation water distribution has reflected and followed
inequities in land distribution. Those with land also get irrigation water
increasing inequality. A meeting was called in Sukhomajri to try to resolve
this inequality. After some discussion, it was decided that each and every
family would get an equal share in the water, irrespective of the size or the
location of their land. A family unit was defined as one sharing a commom
chulha (stove), as this functioned as a decision-making unit, To effectively
manage this system, maintain the dams and distribute the water, the villagers
then started a Water Users' Association, registered under the Societies Act.
Each family was represented in the association.
association,
Water was sold to each
household at a nominal charge to meet maintenance costs at Rs.4 per hour
initially. Under the rules of the association, a member whose cattle was
found grazing in the watershed stood to lose her or his right to water.
Landless and other households could make use of their share either by
share-cropping or by selling their water to others in the command area of the
dams. According
_ to one estimate, as much as 12 per cent of the agricultural
land is being share-cropped in the village.7 These arrangements ensure that
each family has a vested interest in the protection of the watershed, and a
common resource like water thus can benefit the entire community.
With the assurance of benefit to each and every family, protection of the
watershed was immediate. The village did not have to build a wall or a trench
to protect the vast catchment area.
Instead, voluntary closure, or in
Mishra's words "social fencing", stopped people from taking their animals to
graze, Already in the same year, 1980, the goat population decreased from 116
to only 39.
With the exception of one household, all sold theii^. -goats
voluntarily and started stall feeding their buffaloes.
‘
LIBRARY
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32
Creating ecological infrastructure
In Sukhomajri today, an ecological infrastructure for village development
has been created and economic growth has been based on the biomass potential
of both private and community village lands and water.
Since the late 1970s, the village has made an effort to harvest rainwater
through the simple principle of ’’holding every drop of water where it falls. n
Two hundred trenches per hectare have been dug to hold rainwater and reduce
run-off from the village watershed. This has improved the moisture regime of
the soil and induced rapid plant regeneration. Structures like contour bunds
in gullies help in the percolation of water.
Dams at the edge of the
catchment harvest run-off for use by the village to increase productivity from
croplands. By 1985, a total of four dams had been constructed with a command
area of 33 ha.
This water is harvested from 17.5 ha of forest catchment.
Each hectare of what was formerly denuded forest land is now providing
supplemental irrigation for 2 ha of agricultural land.88
Hydrological
observations by CSWCRTI recorded from 1982 to 1984 revealed that 55 to 58 per
cent of the annual rainwater was being converted into run-off
run-off;; and the
for
utilisable water available after transpiration losses
rabi (winter)
irrigation was still 25 to 39 per cent of the monsoon rainfall.
The water
conservation structures and the thick vegetation growth have also stabilised
the soil.
In the catchment areas of the dams, the erosion rate has fallen
drastically to a negligible 1 to 0.1 tonnes per hectare per year in just three
years. Siltation of the dams has thus also been prevented.
This ecological infrastucture has transformed the economic face of the
village. The first immediate benefit has been fodder production. According
to Mishra, this tangible benefit to the entire village was actually
responsible for crystallising the interest of people in community management
of their natural resources. Fodder production from forest lands increased by
more than 150 per cent between 1977 and 1983. The average yield from the
forest watershed increased to 2.6 tonnes per hectare by 1983 (see table 5).
Table 6.
Benefits of watershed protection to Sukhomajri village,
in fodder yield and milk protection before and after
Before
protection
(1973)
After
protection
(1983)
Change
1973-1983
(per cent)
1.
Fodder yield from
forest land (tonne/ha)
1
2.6
+ 160
2.
Annual milk
production (lakh
litres/year)
1.22
2.40
+ 97
Source:
3,077
8445d
___________________
Annual Report, 1983
(Central Soil and Water
Soil Conservation:
Conservation Research and Training Institute, Dehra Dun, Sep. 1984),
p. 151.
Present production of fodder from forest lands in the village is now
tonnes.10 This increased fodder availability has given an impetus to
- 33
*
the dairy industry in the village, Animal holdings have changed steadily from
goats to buffaloes (see table 6), and dairying has become a profitable
activity for the villagers. Goats are no longer kept not just because of the
restrictions on grazing, but also because it makes more economic sense to keep
high milk-yielding buffaloes. Milk production has doubled in the village, but
total milk yield per buffalo has not changed.
In 1977, when there were 79
buffaloes., total milk yield per day was 334 litres (4.2 litres per buffalo),
In 1985, imilk yield was 4.5 litres per buffalo per day.11
Milk production
has thus increased with an increase in buffalo population.
Increased fodder
availability provided both the incentive and the means to keep more animals.
Milk is marketed in the nearby towns of Pinjore and Kalka.
It has been
estimated that about 75 per cent of total milk production is marketed and
brings Rs.4.5 lakhs into the village annually.12
Since fodder is a common
resource in Sukhomajri, poor and marginal farmers also benefit from this
’’White Revolution", not only landed farmers with resources to grow fodder.
Nearly 95 per cent of the families in this village own buffaloes.
Table 7.
Number of milch animals in Sukhomajri before
and after watershed protection, 1977-1983
Milch animal
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
Change
1977-83
(per cent)
Buffaloes
Cows
Goats
79
5
206
83
5
202
95
5
116
111
6
39
140
6
36
144
7
35
146
7
32
+ 85
Source:
84
S.P. Mittal, et al.: ’’Dairy development through hill management in
in the Sivaliks”, in Indian Cooperative Dairy Journal, (Oct. 1982).
Control over commons
With improved grass production there has also been a change in the
management of the state-owned community lands - the reserve forest land in the
watershed of the village.
Earlier, the Haryana Forest Department would
auction the right to cut grass to a contractor, who in turn would charge
villagers Rs.450 per sickle per season (from November to June) for the right
to cut grass.13 But the villagers argued that as
as they
they were
were protecting
protecting the
watershed, they shouldI also be given control over the increased biomass
resulting from their protection efforts.
In 1985, after many years of
insistence, the Forest Department agreed to give joint management of grass
cutting rights to Sukhomajri’s village society against payment of a royalty.
This means that the village society now <controls the developmnt of and the
benefits from grass growth on its common lands.
The society, now known as the Hill Resource Management Society, in turn
charges villagers a nominal amount of Rs.100 to Rs.150 per season to cut
grass. This income - unlike the income earned by the contractor - is used to
generate yet more community resources for the village, in particular
biomass-based resources. For instance, income from grass cutting is ploughed
back- to plant more grass on the catchment, which then benefits the village,
providing more fodder and more milk. This ’’cyclic development" of resources.
8445d
34 -
as it is called by P.R. Mishra, can continue to expand the biomass resource
base of the village.
On private crop lands, the availability of irrigation water has helped to
increase wheat production in the village by 300 per cent.14
While
previously, agriculture met only three months' food needs of the village, and
food had to be imported from outside, now food needs are met entirely from
cultivation within the village and there is even a surplus for sale, Sales of
food grains are estimated to bring a total annual income of Rs.1.35 lakhs into
One indication of the rise in land productivity is that land
the village,
values in the village have gone up from Rs. 17,000 per ha to Rs.36,000 per
hectare since the 1970s. In neighbouring villages, land values have increased
only from Rs.17,000 to Rs.18,000 over the same period. 1 5
With basic subsistence needs like firewood, fodder and food now being
met, the village is next moving towards growing biomass as raw materials for
industrial production. Villagers are planting Eucalyptus citrodora and lemon
grass on private lands to sell for oil extraction, and are also contemplating
setting up an essential oil extraction unit as a village industry.
Another successful attempt has been to use bhabbar grass (Eulaliopsis
binata) to generate an income for the village, Bhabbar grass is used for rope
making and as a raw material for the paper industry, This grass, which can be
both used for fodder and as an industrial raw material, grows in abundance in
the forest watershed above Sukhomajri. With the protection of the catchment,
(about 1,179 ha of reserved forest area) by the villagers, the availability of
this grass has gone up manifold, But the watershed forest being state-owned
land, the Forest Department practice was to auction the rights to cut the
But, as in the case of grass and tree
grass to an outside contractor.
the
Forest
Department
eventually
agreed to give the contract to cut
fodder,
In 1986, for the first time, the
______
bhabbar grass to the village society.
Sukhomajri society received the rights to harvest bhabbar grass on payment of
Rs.22,000. That year, however, because of lack of funds the society auctioned
its rights to a contractor, making a profit of Rs.13,000. The following year,
society members cut the grass themselves and by mid-February had harvested
150,000 kgs of bhabbar, which at the current market price will fetch the
village at least Rs.1.2 lakhs.
If processed further into rope, which would
also create artisanal employment within the village, the price could be more
than doubled to almost Rs.3 lakhs.16
The village society in Sukhomajri has started to play a crucial role in
the management of its common resources.
The society, which started off
managing and distributing common water resources, has over the years moved on
to take control over other resources, such as fodder, bhabbar and even the
option of fish production in the village dams. The name of the society has
been changed from the Water Users' Association to the Hill Resource Management
Society. But the underlying logic for its activities remains the same - to
ensure the interests of the entire village.
In the case of the society
obtaining a contract for harvesting fodder or bhabbar from reserved forest
land, each villager has a vested interest and an equal share in the produce.
This in turn has ensured villagers equal involvement and interest in the
protection of the reserved forest.
Sukhomajri is clearly and example of how to plan the enrichment of a
village ecosystem, including its common lands, its private lands, and its
water resources, to meet the basic biomass needs of the village and to
ecosystem.
Even more
generate enough for export outside the local
importantly, Sukhomajri is an example of how to ensure the rights of the poor
over common resources. Sukhomajri shows that meeting this objective requires
not only sophisticated use of technology, but also an extremely sophisticated
8445d
- 35 community control system, which will be both equitable and sustainable, This
village experience demonstrates that village-based organisation that controls
and when
common resources is possible when the entire village is involved
i--- — ----- the
-rights of every household are protected.
Notes
1 P.R. Mishra, et al.:
Operational research project on watershed
development for sediment drought and flood control - Sukhomajri (Chandigarh,
Central Soil and Water Conservation Research and Training Institute, Research
Centre, Sep. 1980), p. 3.
2
management;
____ community
Anon:
Hill
resource
development
and
Society
for
(New
Delhi,
Sukhomajri and Dasholi Gram Swarajva Manadal)
Promotion of Wasteland Development, Aug. 1984), p. 4.
3
P. R. Mishra, et al., op. cit., p. 3.
4
ibid., pp. 10-16.
5
ibid., p. 25.
6
ibid., p. 32.
7 P.R. Mishra and Madhu Sarin:
Social security through fencing:
Sukhomajri and Nada’s road to self-sustaining developments (Paper presented to
the Conference on Sustainable Development,
Development, International Institute for
Environment and Development, London, Apr. 1987, mimeographed), p. 8.
8
Case studies of
Society for the Promotion of Wasteland Development:
___________________
Sukhomajri and Jawaya (Paper presented to the International Conference on the
Economics of Dryland Degradation and Rehabilitation, Canberra, Australia, Mar.
1986, mimeographed), p. 15.
9
Conservation
Water
Central
Soil
and
Annual report 1985
Institute:
Soil conservation:
pp. 123-124.
Training
Research and
<
(Dehr a Dun,, Aug. 1986),
1o
Training
Conservation
Research
and
Water
Central
Soil
and
Soil conservation:
Annual report 1984 (Dehr a Dun, Sep.. 1985),
Institute:
pp. 86-87.
11
Research
and
Training
Water
Conservation
Central
Soil
and
Institute:
Soil conservation:
Annual report 1983 (Dehra Dun, Sep. 1984),
p. 131.
12 S.P. Mittal, et al.:
’’Dairy development through hill management in
the Sivaliks”, in Indian Cooperative Dairy Journal (Oct. 1982).
8445d
1 3
ibid.
1 4
P.R. Mishra and Madhu Sarin, op. cit., p. 11.
1 5
Society for the Promotion of Wasteland Development, op. cit., p.14.
1 6
P.R. Mishra and Madhu Sarin, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
- 36 -
CHAPTER V
CASE STUDY:
COMMUNITY FORESTRY BY THE CHIPKO MOVEMENT
IN CHAMOLI (UTTAR PRADESH)
The region
Uttarakhand forms the northern part of Uttar Pradesh, India's third
largest and most populous state. Uttarakhand, which largely consists of high
Himalayan mountains, is made up of eight hill districts and covers an area of
51,122 km2, with a population of 4.8 million people. Uttarakhand is one of
the poorest regions in the state and witnesses high rates of out-migration.
After the Indo-Chinese War, several border districts in Uttarakhand were
opened up and connected with roads for strategic reasons. In 1950, the border
district of Chamoli had only 30 km of motorable roads, but by 1980, its
mountains had been blasted to make 1,100 km of roads. These roads not only
took a heavy toll on forest cover during their construction, but the
explosives used also disturbed the sensitive hydro-geological system of these
young mountains. Even more importantly, roads also opened up the forests to
felling by contractors. A large part of the catchment of the Alaknanda river
- a major tributary of the Ganga - is located in this district. Between 1960
and 1970, the forests of the Alaknanda catchment were extensively cut. Today,
much of the region is prone to landslides and floods.
Destruction of the
forests has led to repeated floods which have had far-reaching effects in the
plains. In 1970, the Alaknanda witnessed an unprecedented flood, The entire
village of Belakuchi was washed away by swirling torrents.
Fifty-eight per cent of the land area of Chamoli district is still
officially classified as forest land, but today these slopes are barren, The
forest area in this region is legally classified into three categories:
civil forests and panchayat forests.
The
reserved and protected forests;
reserved and protected forests are under the control of the Uttar Pradesh
State Forest Department, These forests cover an area of 370,486 ha, or 40 per
cent of the total land area and about 70 per cent of the forest area of
Uttarakhand.
These forests are felled and afforested according to Forest
Department working plans. Civil forests are under the control of the Revenue
These
Department of the state and directly under the district magistrate.
forests are afforested by the civil-soyam wing of the Forest Department only
These forests cover
after receiving an application from the village.
<
104,300 ha.
Panchayati forests controlled by the village panchayats are
demarcated for the exclusive use of the village. These cover only 52,149 ha,
10 per cent of the forest area and 5 per cent of the land area of the
district.1
As compared to other parts of the country, where there is acute land
hunger, in this district there are vast stretches of barren common :lands,
For
which were once under forests but are now unsuitable for agriculture.
instance, in Pokhani village, while the total land area is 353.3 ha, the land
under agriculture is a mere 41.4 ha. The bulk of 306.6 ha is civil forest
In Pakhi village, out of a total land area of 259.5 ha, 163.7 ha is
land.
civil land, now degraded and waste, This is the situation in most villages in
this district. Because of this degradation, in spite of the availability of
land, the grazing pressure on Chamoli's forest lands is extremely high, This
pressure prevents regeneration of vegetation and maintains the common lands in
a state of barrenness.
Agriculture is the predominant occupation of Chamoli's people, though the
area under cultivation is small - only 13.2 per cent of the land is net sown
8445d
- 37
area in the district as compared to the state average of 59.9 per cent, Land
suitable for agriculture is not only smaller than in the rest of the state,
but is relatively less fertile. Except in valleys, the soil is shallow and of
poor texture. With a predominance of cereal crops, agricultural cropping is
of a subsistence nature.
Non-agricultural sources of income are few.
The manufacturing sector
contributes 4.5 per cent to total income and accounts for 3.7 per cent of
total employment in all eight districts of Uttarakhand.
Degradation of the environment and the consequent soil erosion are
further reducing the fertility of the land and the already meagre returns.
The women,
Men follow the road to the plains in search of jobs and cash,
elderly and children are left in Chamoli to tend the soil.
Women are the
backbone of the villages’ subsistence economy. According to the 1981 census,
the five districts in the State of Uttar Pradesh with the highest proportion
of female cultivators are Tehri, Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakashi, Chamoli and
Pithoragarh. In Chamoli, as compared with the state average of 6 per cent,
43.5 per cent of all women are classified as workers, and 95 per cent of women
2
The
workers are cultivators who do all agricultural work except ploughing.
sex ratio in rural Chamoli is 1,088 women to 1,000 men whereas the national
sex ratio is 933 women to 1,000 men, an indicator of the high levels of
out-migration.
With the decimation of the environment, the task of these women has
become more and more difficult and inhuman.
A study carried out in Owing
village (Chamoli district) found that women walk at least 10 km three out of
•every four days for an average of seven hours per day to bring back about
25 kg of wood with each headload.3 A study of three villages in the Kumaon
region of Uttar Pradesh shows that women have to put in an extraordinary
amount of time in the fields in addition to fetching fuel and fodder.
In
these villages male migration is also high.
The survey showed that 0.9
persons per household had migrated.
Sometimes the incidence was as high as
2.33 persons in households with five persons each. Consequently, the
male-female ratio in the villages was 1:1.4 for the working age group of 15 to
50 years. During the peak agricultural season, women worked as long as seven
hours daily in cultivation and animal husbandry.
The amount of energy
expended as human labour for fuel and fodder collection averaged 2.5 times the
4
amount of human energy spent on cultivation in these villages.
The Kumaon study notes that with receding forest cover, energy expended
in direct agricultural activity as compared to energy expended in fodder and
fuel collection will continue to decline every year as women will have to go
further and further to gather wood and forage, and this will lead to a
shortage of labour for cultivation.
The future spells disaster both for the environment and for the people in
Because of the small
these villages, especially for the women left behind,
size of landholdings - the majority of which average 0.5 ha - farmers do not
have the space to grow forage crops in their fields. As firewood grows scarce
or too difficult to collect, increasing amounts of dung - traditionally used
as manure - will be burned as fuel, and because of the lack of manure, the
productivity of the land will decline further. The final consequence will be
a highly degraded physical environment and an increasingly undernourished,
overworked population, especially of females unable to eke out a decent living.
8445d
- 38
People’s movement against deforestation
The forest bureaucracy in Uttar Pradesh has consistently blamed expanding
agriculture and the fuel collection activities of local people and their
grazing animals for the extensive deforestation in the region.
But local
people themselves see the Forest Department as the plunderer of the region’s
forest wealth. Large areas of forests in the region have been cut under the
Forest Department's working plans. Corruption has ensured that instead of
just one marked tree being felled as indicated in the plans, ten other
unmarked trees have typically also been felled. The 1970 Alakananda flood and
the associated landslides make people acutely conscious of the link between
deforestation and floods, landslides, soil erosion and the dependence of their
survival on the preservation of their immediate environment. At the same
time, these disasters heightened their alienation from the Forest Department,
an agency which the local people see as one which denies them access to their
neighbouring forests but readily allocates these same forests to the needs of
powerful and wealthy outsiders from the plains.
The now world-famous Chipko Movement against deforestation was born in
Marchi 1973 in the remote hill town of Gopeshwar in Chamoli district.
Representatives from a sports goods factory situated in distant Allahabad had
come to Gopeshwar to cut ten ash trees near Mandal village. The villagers had
themselves been denied the use of the wood of these same trees for making
their agricultural implements. In their anger, the villagers courteously told
the sports good manufacturers not to cut the trees but when the contractors
persisted, the villagers hit upon the idea of hugging the earmarked trees "Chipko” being the Hindi word "to hug”.
The sports goods manufacturers
returned to Allahabad empty-handed.
The Chipko Movement reached a high point in 1974 when the women of Reni
village, some 100 km from Gopeshwar, got involved in saving the Reni forest in
a dramatic way. One day when the men were away, the forest contractor arrived
in Reni to begin felling trees, Undaunted by the number of men or their axes,
the women of Reni, led by Gauri Devi, an illiterate woman of 50, barred the
path to the forest which went through the village.
The expert committee later set up by the state government to inquire into
whether the Reni forest should be felled or not found that the Reni women were
more right from a scientific point of view than was the Forest Department.
This gave the movement considerable respectability. The committee concluded
that because of the highly sensitive nature of these watersheds situated deep
in the Himalayas, all felling should be banned to allow regeneration.
Another dramatic movement took place in Dungari-Paitoli village in 1978,
where the battle was not only bitter but set wife against husband and mother
against son.
In 1978, the Government's Horticulture Department negotiated
with the male-dominated panchayat for the acquisition of a nearby community
forest in order to set up a potato seed farm. The men were led to believe
that the village would in turn receive a motorable road, electricity and a
health centre, and that the primary school would be upgraded to a high
school. When the women learnt that the forest had been given away by the
panchayat, they protested strongly. The destruction of the forest for them
would have meant walking at least another 5 km every day to fetch fuel and
fodder. Emboldened by the support they received from the Chipko activists,
the women refused to let the forest be destroyed. After a bitter struggle in
which the women were strongly opposed by their men and threatened with arrest
by the district administration, the women finally won. None of the men's
tactics, including threats to Chipko workers, worked in the end, and the
district administration decided not to fell the forest.5
8445d
4
39
The local people’s sense of alienation towards government bureaucracies
controlling forest resources has strong historical roots.
The progressive
minution of forest communities’ rights to the use of their forests had evoked
a sharp reaction against the British Government during the 19th and early part
of the 20th century. The Forest Settlement Officer of British Garhwal, at the
time of the constitution of reserved forests in 1913, commented that "... the
notion obstinately persists in the minds of all from the highest to the
lowest, that the Government is taking away their forests from them and is
robbing them of their own property ..."
In Garhwal, the reservation of
forests in 1913 was followed by extensive social movements in 1916 and 1921,
the latter coinciding with the first national non-cooperation movement by
Mahatma Gandhi and engulfing large areas of the Garhwal and Kumaon regions of
Uttarakhand. 6
The post-colonial forest policy has essentially been a
continuation of the colonial forest policy asserting state monopoly rights at
the expense of forest communities. The Chipko Movement in Uttarakhand, thus,
has deep roots in the history of the region’s resistance to the colonial
policies of the British.
People's movement for afforestation
Even as the world heard of Chipko, in Chamoli the Dasholi Gram Swarajya
Mandal (DGSM) - the local agency that had pioneered the Chipko Movement - had
begun a new phase of the movement. DGSM is an old Gandhi an organisation in
the region set up in the mid-1960s to promote village-level industries based
on local raw materials.
It has a small cottage unit to produce turpentine
from pine resin, and a saw mill.
DGSM workers began to plant trees in degraded areas in 1975 with the help
of concerned students. In 1976, the DGSM held a month-long tree-planting camp
above the town of Joshimath. Through the camp they drew the attention of the
civic authorities to the increasing deforestation being caused by the military
encampment above the town.
As a result of their work, the Uttar Pradesh
Government set up a committee to investigate the ecological problems around
the town. But there was limited involvement of the local population.
The
tree-planting exercises only helped the DGSM workers and local students in
their own education. The survival rates of the trees were also poor.
Around that time there was a landslide near Pakhi village which was used
to show the local
villagers the consequences of the growing ecological
crises.
A
camp was organised to take up tree planting to stabilise the
landslide.This led to a dialogue with the
local villagers and their
involvement
in tree planting. Soon women also began to participate, and
simultaneously the survival rate of the trees planted began to crawl upwards
from a dismal low of 10 per cent. As word of this effort began to spread,
DGSM's contacts began to grow with other villages, especially through the
youth who had participated in the campaign against the felling of the Reni
forest.
The camps also began to become more than tree-planting camps, as
villagers began to discuss their other problems of health, roads and the
absence of various services. From Pakhi the afforestation effort spread to
Dwing village and then to Bemru village. Today DGSM is working with some 250
villagers along the Balkhills, Patalganga, Garurganga and Kalpganga rivers,
all of which are tributaries of the Alakananda.
"We now plant few trees ourselves.
Our work is mainly to create
conditions in which the villagers can plant trees themselves", explains Chandi
Prasad Bhatt, the leader of the Chipko Movement. This change is the result of
a slow but steady process of understanding the problems of local communities
and gaining credibility with them.
8445d
40
Bhatt says that there were several reasons why DGSM took to tree
planting. Firstly, we realised that we not only have the right to prevent the
Government from causing further deterioration in the ecological situation, we
Secondly, we
also have the duty to do something to improve the environment,
knew there was not enough time to wait for the Forest Department to afforest
the mountains.
Given their dismal record in planting, this would be a
near-impossible tasks for them.
Moreover, the trees planted by the Forest
Department would not be of any use to the local people and in most cases would
not be given to the villagers, Lastly, for the women, every passing day meant
worsening hardships, as forests moved further and further away form the
village and their daily walk for survival lengthened.
DGSM decided to concentrate work in a few micro-catchments of the
Alakananda watershed which had witnessed the worst impact of the 1970 floods.
This watershed, in the upper reaches of the Himalayas, is extremely degraded.
Every year tonnes of silt from these mountains flow down into the river below
and the land frequently caves in, burying fields and houses.
Initial meetings and strategy
The first meeting with local villagers' participation was held in Bemru
and was exclusively attended by men, recalls Bhatt. The men did not exhibit
much enthusiasm for planting trees. Women soon started coming hesitantly to
village meetings. They, too, had many reservations but were more receptive to
the idea of planting trees.
DGSM workers continued to visit neighbouring
villagers to convince people to plant trees around their villages, and slowly
build contacts with village elders, women and young men. In many instances it
took repeated visits and much persuasion to involve people in planting trees,
but today this has changed.
By
Up until 1982, DGSM was actively working in about five villages.
1983, afforestation work had started in 16 villages and by the end of 1986
People have already planted
more than 250 villages were working with DGSM.
more than 2 1/2 lakh trees, making this the country's most successful
community afforestation programme. DGSM has organised over 60 village camps
in the last five years in which at least 5,000 villagers have participated,
the majority of whom have been women.
Today, DGSM receives dozens of requests from villagers keen to afforest
land around their villages, requests for trees and for assistance in making
smokeless stoves, and invitations to hold camps in their villages.
DGSM's strategy for involving people in afforestation is multi-pronged.
The first step is to spread awareness about the importance and benefits of
afforestation. Once people realise the value of trees and evolve a system for
community management of the plantations, DGSM then supports the villagers in
planting trees on their degraded lands.
The main tool that DGSM uses for education, exhortation and involvement
of the local people is what it calls "eco-development camps". On the face of
it, these camps are simple two- to five-day meetings of some 50 to 300
villagers, students, scientists and social workers to undertake community tree
plantation work. But in truth these camps are the first step to helping local
communities gain enough confidence to take control of their lives and of their
natural resources. For DGSM, tree planting is but a symbol of the integrated
development of the environment and of the people dependent on it.
Nearly 75 per cent of participants in the camps are women. Women from
many neighbouring villages come to attend these camps, leaving their families
8445d
41
The programme of the camps is divided between
home.
and husbands back home.
discussions on. local concerns, planning for the future of the village, and
physical work, All participants join to dig pits, to plant trees and at times
In the evening, everyone participates in
i..
to carry stones to build walls.
songs and prayers.
While creating people’s organisations to deal with the task of
environmental enrichment, DGSM clearly recognises the role of women in all
development work in this region. DGSM has therefore made special efforts to
develop women's organisations, known as "Mahila Mangal Dais". Every village
has a Dal which includes women from each family. These organisations have no
written constitution but effectively take on the work of afforestation. The
members of the local Mahila Mangal Dal are the main participants in the camps
and often its organisers. Women chair the meetings and put forward their
proposals for the development of their village, To organise youth in support
of the environment, a village youth group is simultaneously formed called
"Dalyon ka Dagadya" - '•Friends of Trees” - which often supports the Mahila
Mangal Dal in its work.
Obstacles and opportunities
The camps organised by DGSM hve demonstrated several obstacles that lie
in the way of organising people to take control and management of their
immediate environment to improve their living conditions.
The camps also
illustrate some major opportunities. The biggest obstacle is the lack of
confidence and attitude of abject dependence on the Government felt by the
villagers. The region is marked by acute poverty, illiteracy and a high rate
of male migration. The camps organised by DGSM greatly help the villagers to
gain confidence in themselves, to assert themselves against external
could help to
i
interference, and to explore ways within their control that
improve their lives.
The second finding of these camps is that once the people are ready to
act, they want to set their own priorities. To plant trees in an area with a
high animal grazing pressure, it is essential to build walls to protect the
trees from animals. At one of the initial camps, villagers pointed out that
they were less interested in making walls to protect trees and more interested
in making walls to protect their crops from marauding wild animals from nearby
forests. Because of these wild animals, many peasants had to stay out all
night next to their fields to protect their meagre crops, and losses were
often heavy. They therefore told DGSM that they first wanted help to make
walls around their fields.
Fortunately, DGSM was able to convince a
government agency to use funds available to it under a food-for-work programme
for this purpose. The villagers were thus paid to make walls around their
fields, and DGSM gained enormously in credibility with the villagers as it was
seen as an organisation responding to their priorities. The walls not only
helped to increase agricultural output, but at the same time, the entire
experience led to one crucial fall out. Space was left between the fields and
the walls, and trees were planted along this corridor, Long before the trees
started giving any returns, grass started growing profusely in the corridors
because animals were not longer grazing there. The women were very excited to
see all this grass growing next to their fields, reducing the drudgery
involved in collecting and carrying the grass from distant forests, This made
women very interested in afforestation.
The increased involvement of women brought forth many differences with
men in terms of their attitudes towards afforestation. Firstly, women were
much more interested in afforestation than men, presumably because women have
to undertake the arduous labour of collecting fuel and fodder from the
8445d
- 42
receding forests, and also because as they do not migrate away from the
villages like their men, women’s consciousness is still rooted in their
immediate environment and its health. Despite their heavy work burden, women
have come forward to put in much more work than men in planting and taking
care of trees by manuring them and if necessary giving them water.
Secondly, the initial camps brought out the differences between men and
women over the choice of tree species to be planted.
While men were more
interested in species that would help them meet cash needs women wanted trees
for household needs like fuel, fodder and fruit.
The species to be planted
are discussed at the camps and the wishes of the women are given priority.
The species that have since been planted include walnut, soapnut, Himalayan
hazel, green oak, mulberry, orange, lemon and several local fodder species.
Following this experience, the DGSM approached the Government of Uttar
Pradesh to undertake wall-building activities under the National Rural
Employment Programme, with the DGSM promoting plantation activities on a
voluntary basis by the villagers, But the state government did not respond to
this suggestion.
Having aroused the expectations of the people, the DGSM
tried to support wall-building work from its own meagre financial resources.
In 1982, the DGSM received a grant from the Planning Commission (later
transferred to the Department of Environment) to undertake the Garurganga
watershed development project.
Under this project, DGSM now has funds to
assist 27 villages to take up afforestation work along various tributaries of
the Alakananda river situated between the towns of Chamoli and Joshimath. The
project covers an area of 100 km2 with villages located at an altitude
ranging from 3,500 to 7,500 feet.
Organising eco-development camps and wall
construction work have remained important parts of the afforestation work, but
promotion of wood-saving fuel technologies like efficient stoves and biogas
plants has also steadily been taken up. By 1985, almost 16 km of stone walls
had been built in these high mountains.
DGSM operates normally by giving the contract for making the walls to the
village Mahila Mangal Dal (women’s organisation), or in come cases to the
village Dalyon ka Dagadya (youth group). These village organisations take on
the entire supervision of the work. People are paid statutory minimum wages
for their labour. Fencing is one of the major expenses of any tree plantation
programme.
Because people are involved in the planning for the wall and
understand that it is being built for their needs, they also cut on costs. In
Dwing village, a 740 metre long, 5 foot high stone wall cost only Rs.3,000 While
it would have cost the Forest Department at least five times as much,
experience has consistently shown that women are more interested in tree
plantation work, men do come forward to build walls because of the cash
incentive. However, in a few villages like Hyuna, Tirosi and Bandwara, women
outnumber men even in wall building, and in all the villages women do
participate in building the walls sometimes in equal numbers as men.
Saplings are supplied mostly from DGSM’s own nurseries free of charge to
the Mahila Mangal Dais.
Up to 1982, before the start of the Garurganga
watershed development project, 100,000 trees were planted. By 1985, more than
250,000 trees had been planted by these village organisations.
The Mahila Mangal Dais look after the plantations. They regularly water,
weed and give manure to the plants. Once or twice every month - mostly on the
eleventh day of the Hindu month, which is considered auspicious for tending
and watering plants - the women gather to work on the plantations.
8445d
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Land for plantation
The patches of land taken up for plantation work are chosen by the Mahila
Mangal Dais. The land chosen is normally community land, that is, land under
the control of the panchayats.
Occasionally, even civil land under the
Revenue Department, forest land under the Forest Department and, in one case,
private land has been chosen.
But unlike in other parts of the country where permission is first sought
by the agency to plant trees on government lands - which can take many years the women in Chamoli, backed by DGSM, take up afforestation and management of
the land with total disregard for state authority and regulation.
These ’’common lands", of which there are vast plots around the villages,
were traditionally managed by local communities, and are essential to meeting
the biomass needs of the village.
In the case of Dwing village, the land used for afforestation is under
the control of the Sericulture Department of the state government. Civil
land, under the charge of the district magistrate, had been given to this
Department and then closed to the villagers, exacerbating their shortage of
fuel and fodder. The Sericulture Department then used a mere tenth of the
land, making the villagers extremely angry. The Mahila Mangal Dal, supported
by DGSM has now planted between 4,000 and 5,000 trees in the area.
If the land chosen is by any chance private land, a contract is drawn up
which specifies that the land and the accruing benefits are to be used by the
entire community. In Langi village, the land chosen by the Dal organisation
actually benefited 19 families out of the 21 in the village. The work was
started only when the village agreed that all families would have an equal
share in the produce from the land.
Community control over distribution
In each village, the Mahila Mangal Dais lay down new community control
systems for the use of the biomass from the planted areas. These systems are
not only equitable and sustainable but more importantly take into account the
most pressing needs of the villagers.
Equity and control are basic preconditions in the work of the Chipko
women. Without the equal distribution of benefits, community afforestation
could have never been a success. Women have evolved simple ways of sharing
the produce from the common lands. While trees take many years to bear fruit,
grasses grow quickly and provide valuable fodder.
To share this fodder
equally, on only the particular days decided by the Dal, does one woman from
each houshold go to the protected area to collect grass. As the trees are
still small, equitable distribution of their produce has yet to be worked
out. But in this way, women have already started asserting their right to
control the piece of commons that they have jointly enriched and cared for,
often an illegal assertion in the current order of administration.
In some cases, this assertion by the women’s groups has led to conflicts
with panchayat leaders over trees planted on panchayat lands.
In Bached
village there was a clash between the Mahila Mangal Dal and the head of the
panchayat over the rights to the grass growing on the panchayat land protected
by the Dal. The clash resulted in a police case and the women took the matter
to the district authorities and forced the panchayat to withdraw the police
case. The panchayat thus had to informally accept the Dal's rights over the
afforested panchayat land as far as distribution of produce is concerned.
8445d
Results
The afforestation work taken up by the Chipko Movement has helped the
local communities in many ways. Fuel and fodder shortages have greatly eased
and will ease further as the plantations grow and more land is brought under
protection.
An interesting aspect of the Chipko plantations is their high survival
rates. In many places, survival rates are as high as 90 per cent. A survey
carried out by the Indian Institute of Science in 1983 compared survival rates
in plantations supported by DGSM and those undertaken by the Forest Department
in the same area.
The survey found that while the survival of Forest
Department plantations was a low 14 to 21 per cent, survival in the Chipko
plantations ranged from 68 to 88 per cent, This was in 1985 and in later
years, with greater experience, the Chipko success rates have been even
higher. Because of the high grazing intensity in the area, walls have been
essential to protect the seedlings. "But the walls work only if they are
people’s walls", insists Bhatt. The Forest Department also builds walls to
protect its plantations, but these walls are regularly breached by the people,
because they have no interest in the biomass growing behind the wall. Walls
have been successful only when built to protect the interests of the people,
not to keep the people away from their rights.
But the biggest effect of this people’s movement for afforestation is
that it has given the women a voice, a voice which is today weaving a social
transformation in the fabric of Garhwal society, Getting together to plant
trees is just the beginning;
now the women’s organisations are getting
together to demand drinking water and other basic necessities, In addition,
the groups’ militancy over the control of forests is now growing, whether
these be government forests or panchayat forests.
Mahila Mangal Dais are taking control of the existing forest lands near
their village, demanding that the local people be given first right of use to
the forests in their vicinity.
They want forests to be managed not as
short-term revenue earners, but on a sustainable basis for meeting basic
In 1982, in
village needs and for village-based industrial development.
Khalla Mandal, near the town of Gopeshwar, the Van Nigam was given the
contract to cut 333 trees for firewood supply for the towns of Gopeshwar and
Chamoli. Only 16 were cut when the local women stopped further felling.
In Bached village, the Forest Department marked the forest near 1their
village for felling, but the women's group has successfully stalledL any
felling for the past four years. Kalavati Devi, chairperson of the Dal, told
the district forest officer, "You will take away the trees, all 1,600 of them
in a matter of days. These trees will support us for at least one or two
generations. What will we do? Where will we go for fuel and fodder?" To
which the forester responded that the forest was his and he would use force
if the women stopped the work. Kalavati Devi argued, "If the forest is yours,
then the country is ours. And if you threaten us with police rule, we will
rule the village and use force to stop your work." Since then the forest
officials have not been able to enter the Bached forest.
In Gopeshwar town itself,
itself. the Mahila Mangal Dal has a tough time
protecting its forests. These forests, literally the only remaining green
space for miles around, perch precariously near the burgeoning town. After
the formation of Gopeshwar as a township, local agricultural land was taken
With
over by the Government to develop the district headquarters.
deforestation, the problem of fodder for cattle has become acute. Milk must
be sold to buy essential consumer items, lowering the nutritional intake of
the families. The forest is now protected by the women and any local person
8445d
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caught entering the forest is fined by the Mahila Mangal Dal. Every day two
women take time off from their busy schedules to patrol this forest.
The
other vital reason these women protect this grove is that it is the only space
where they can go for their ablutions without any inhibitions.
In Bached village in 1987, the women took over the formal "Van Panchayat”
- the village body which controls the village forest land.
In village
elections, women alleged that the former sarpanch (village head) had been
illegally cutting the forests, and demanded fresh elections.
The district
authorities conceded fresh elections and five of the seven positions have gone
to women - a totally unprecedented development.
The Chipko strategy for afforestation can be summed up in the following
"Before we begin to green the land, we must
words of Chandi Prasad Bhatt:
n
green the people. Those who do not have a voice must begin to shout.
Notes
1 Government
1981), p. 22.
of
Uttar
Pradesh:
Forest
statistics
(Uttar
Pradesh,
Workers
population
totals:
Provisional
India:
2 Census of
non-workers (Registrar General and Census Commissioner for India, 1981).
and
3 Madhura Swaminathan: A study of energy use patterns in two villages
of Garhwal Himalayas (mimeographed).
4 J.S. Singh, Uma Pandey and A.K. Tiwari:
"Man and forest:
Himalayan case study”, in Ambio (Stockholm), Vol. XIII, No. 2, 1984.
s
Anil Agarwal,
India*s environment,
1982), pp. 42-43.
A Central
The state of
Revi Chopra, Kalpena Sharma (eds.):
1982 (New Delhi, Centre for Science and Environment,
6 Ramchandra Guha:
"Forestry in British and post-British India",
Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), 29 Oct. 1983, pp. 1882-1896.
n
8445d
in
46
CHAPTER VI
CASE STUDY:
CO-OPERATIVE FORESTRY IN A SALINE AREA OF GUJARAT
The Cambay taluka of Kaira district in Gujarat is an area locally known
as the ”Bhal”, meaning ’’forehead”, because it is a vast stretch of barren
land, like the wide, hairless forehead of the human body. This area, situated
along the western coast of India, has been affected by sea intrusion and
consequent sal inisation.
The vegetation is extremely sparse and the people
are very poor.
In the early seventies an Ahmedabad-based organisation. the St. Xavier’s
Behavioural Science Centre, started working in some ten villages of the
region, The Centre started with non-formal education to change the system of
values which reduces the poor to abject slavery, but found very soon that
unless the economic dependence of the poor were broken, their value system
could not change either.
The Centre then started work on evolving an
alternate economic model, taking into consideration the harsh ecological
They were financially
conditions and the poor resource base of the people,
assisted in this work with a grant from a German church organisation.
In the villages, the Centre found a rigid caste structure, dominated by
upper-caste Rajputs, The Rajputs wielded economic and political power in the
village, The scheduled castes (lower castes) were bonded labourers and mainly
cultivated the fields of the Rajputs.
Within the scheduled castes, the
Vankars were former weavers who had become landless labourers with the coming
of textile mills.
After Independence, some Vankars acquired land for
agriculture. But the land in most cases was poor, unirrigated and saline, and
Where
the Vankars were forced to continue to work under the Rajputs.
cultivation was attempted, it remained marginal and in fact indebtedness
increased with increased investment into the poor land. A survey carried out
by the Xavier’s Centre in eight villages showed that while the average annual
income per family member was around Rs.700, their expenditures reached Rs.900
per family member. This resulted in borrowing of money at 60 to 100 per cent
interest rates from the Rajputs.1
Indebtedness was thus a major problem in
the area.
The Centre decided to work in these villages, but clearly working with
the entire village community was not possible, since the Rajputs were pitted
against the lower castes, The aim had to be to empower the scheduled castes,
The
economically and socially to fight the exploitation of the Rajputs.
Centre also came to realise that in these villages there were no class
identities but only caste identities, The Centre therefore started work with
only one scheduled caste community. the Vankars, instead of with all the poor
together so as to be able to work with one homogeneous group.
Search for alternative economic options
To reduce the economic exploitation of the Vankars, the Centre explored
an alternate economic option.
The first possibility was a loan scheme to
purchase buffaloes. Detailed studies found that lack of fodder in the region
made the scheme economically unviable. They then made an attempt to improve
agricultural technology, but the resultant increase in productivity on these
marginal lands was very poor, while the investments of time and money were
high, and the new technology only made the farmers more vulnerable to natural
calamities.
8445d
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The Centre then tried a third option - to cultivate the idle community
lands which were highly degraded and saline. It was hoped that this strategy
would, firstly, improve the economic status of the Vankars and therefore
reduce their dependence on the Rajputs, and secondly, would forge unity among
the group through the creation of a co-operative venture.
The Centre imposed two conditions before starting work. It insisted that
the Centre would support cultivation only if common land was offered by the
entire Vankar community, and that the initiative to give land also came from
the entire Vankar community. These steps were taken to create the feeling
that the project belonged to the Vankar community from the very inception and
not to the Xavier's Centre.
The Vankar community in these villages had some common lands which had
earlier been with the Revenue Department but had been given on lease to the
community. The lease was either for a very long term like 99 years or was an
annual lease given to a co-operative of scheduled castes under the
Government's land reform programme.
In most cases, these lands were too
degraded to be cultivated and were lying unused. In 1980, work started in
Vadgam village on 312 ha of salinised water-logged community wasteland through
a co-operative of all Vankar families in the village. By 1985, the Centre was
working with seven village co-operatives on 4,000 ha of wasteland.
The challenge here was to find a viable economic crop for these lands.
The first choice was agricultural crops, but because of poor land conditions,
this alternative was discarded.
The co-operative then decided to plant
Prosopis juliflora, a hardy, salt-tolerant plant, which is found extensively
in the region. For the villagers, the idea at first seemed ridiculous.
Prosopis is considered a weed and grows in abundance. It is in fact the only
tree found in large numbers in the area and is of no economic value other than
for supply of domestic cooking fuel, To plant this tree on their common land
made little sense to the Vankars initially.
But Xavier's Centre found that Prosopis has an extremely high calorific
value and is good for firewood and charcoal production. The land was treated
with labour-intensive techniques like trenches to reduce salinisation, and the
Vankars were paid the statutory minimum wages for this work. In 1985-86 the
co-operative took up afforestation under the National Rural Employment
Programme, which provided money for intensive earthworks and planting of trees.
The silvicultural techniques for growing Prosopis in such degraded lands
were not well known.
Initially, the Centre suggested the planting of 750
trees per hectare, but later this was increased to 2,500 trees in each
hectare. Prosopis trees can be cut for firewood after six years coppiced and
subsequently cut again after three to four years. The expected life of the
tree is 40 years. In Vadgam, where the co-operative has already harvested two
crops, the yield per tree has ranged from 26-50 kg. In 1986-87, about 8,000
trees were cut. Wood production was 208 tonnes, which can fetch Rs.52,000
after sale as firewood or Rs.84,000 when turned into charcoal.
Obstacles and conflicts
The co-operative after harvesting the wood ran into problems with the
Forest Department.
Under the regulations of the Forest Act, the Forest
Department has rules governing the transport of wood which require that a
transit pass is needed to transport any forest produce like firewood or
charcoal for a distance of more than 5 km. This pass is valid for only during
the number of hours which a truck or other transportation takes to reach its
8445d
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destination from the loading point. Moreover, the forest officer of the area
has to be present at the time of loading the produce on the truck.
This has become a serious problem. The co-operative has found time after
time that after a date has been fixed with the forest officials for the
transport of wood and the truck has been hired at considerable cost, the
forester does not turn up to inspect the truck and issue the pass, Not only
does the co-operative end up losing valuable time and investment but also
their potential buyers, who as a result of these delays find an alternative
source.
The reasons for the problems are that in some cases foresters are
closely aligned with the upper castes (who are opposed in the project), or in
other cases, the foresters demand bribes from the co-operative.
The main benefit of the co-operative so far has been the off-season
employment provided to the Vankars at statutory minimum wages. This has meant
that the landless and marginal farming Vankars who worked for the upper castes
at much lower wages now have alternate employment. This in turn meant that
the economic control of the Rajputs has started to decline as the Vankars have
stopped going to Rajput farms for employment at low wages.
The project has coincided with the coming of irrigation to the area
through the Mahi canal and the increase of land area under paddy, a
labour-intensive crop.
This event has increased the Rajputs’' demand for
labour at the same time as their traditional labourers, the Vankars, are
finding alternative sources of employment.
The Rajputs have therefore started instigating trouble.
In many
villages, Vankars who formed a co-operative have been assaulted and harassed.
Often, the Vankars fought back by filing cases with the police, disrupting the
traditional code of conduct.
Tensions in the region finally erupted into violence in the village of
Golana. The village has about 440 ha of wasteland which has been planted by a
Rajputs are roughly 20 per cent of the village
Vankar co-operative.
population but own 60 per cent of the cultivable land, The upper caste had in
the past tried to break up the group by creating factions within the
co-operative. When this strategy failed, the Rajputs started intimidating the
Vankars with physical assaults and by harassing the women.
The Vankars
responded by filing police cases. In 1985, a plot for housing was allotted to
the Vankars by the district authorities. This site was chosen by the Vankars,
who had earlier been given a site on swampy land. The new site was used by
the Rajputs for threshing their grain, and this allotment was against their
explicit wishes, When the Vankars took possession of the land, the Rajputs
On the
retaliated by brutally murdering the leaders of the co-operative.
night of 25 January 1986, the village of Golana witnessed murder and looting
burning of houses. The Rajputs killed four young men and injured and looted
many others.
A year after the massacre, the co-operative is still alive, The Vankars
in Golana are angry and have strengthened their resolve to find alternate
employment from their own co-operative land, They are not prepared to go back
to work in the fields of the Rajputs.
This experience in the Bhal area shows that when afforestation improves
the status of the poor, it can lead to conflicts with those who currently
benefit from their poverty, When the Rajputs were threatened by the changing
economic status of the Vankars in Golana, they mercilessly lashed out at the
Vankars. Given the highly stratified communities in many Indian villages, it
will be difficult to help the poor by working with the entire community. The
8445d
- 49
assets created will have to be controlled not by the entire village but by the
specific (poor) target group. This may lead inevitable to violent conflicts.
Note
V
1 St. Xavier's Non-formal Education Society:
(Ahmedabad, Behavioural Science Centre, 1979), p. 9.
4
*
8445d
Annual report
1978-79
50 -
CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSIONS
Forests are not just "natural entities", they are also "social
entities". In a country like India, forests are not only the habitat of 40
million tribal people, they also provide the majority of the rural population
with the wherewithal for survival through supplies of fuel, fodder, building
materials, herbs artisanal raw materials and water.
For these reasons,
afforestation calls for more than just technical responses like increasing the
availability of saplings, digging of pits, planting of trees, and then
measuring success by counting the number of trees planted.
The equally
important social questions are who plants the trees, on what lands are the
trees planted, who benefits, and what trees are planted for what purpose?
Given the importance of trees and grasses in India's biomass-based
subsistence economy, within which the majority of people survive, it is clear
that the biomass that is regenerated should be of a character that supports
this subsistence economy. Households in maximum need of support are those who
do not have access to or have only limited access to basic biomass-producing
factors like land and cattle. But since cattle need fodder to survive, and
fodder grows on land, access to cattle is also dependent on either income to
purchase fodder or direct access to land. Thus, it is the landless and
land-poor who suffer most from shortages of biomass like fuel and fodder,
except in circumstances where sufficient biomass is available from the common
lands.
Land in India can be divided into three broad categories: private;
community-controlled and managed;
and state-owned and managed.
The
community-controlled lands, namely the panchayat lands, are common lands in
the true sense of the phrase, but state-owned lands such as those controlled
by the revenue departments and the forest departments of the state governments
are common lands by default. Thus, all non-private lands are used by the
people in one way or another to meet their biomass needs and are in that sense
common lands. Unfortunately, all these common lands - the panchayat lands,
revenue lands (which are extensively used for grazing animals), and government
forest lands - are lying in an extremely degraded state.
The National Remote Sensing Agency has shown through satellite pictures
that nearly half the area controlled by forest departments (and often called
forest lands) does not have a tree cover that can be called a forest. It has
been variously estimated that between one-third and one-half of India is lying
as wasteland, with biomass production less than a fifth of its potential.
Though this includes a large fraction of private agricultural lands, a large
part are the common lands of the country.
This degradation of the land constitutes the basis of the biomass poverty
The degradation of common lands affects the landless and
of the poor.
land-poor
even more
and
thwarts
attempts
to
help
them
through development
If afforestation
programmes like animal husbandry schemes, for instance.
programmes are to benefit landless and land-poor households on a priority
basis, the biggest problem they will face is access to land.
4
In the case studies we have studied, different approaches have been taken
to deal with this problem;
(a)
8445d
the West Bengal farm forestry programme is promoting farm forestry on
lands that landless households have received under the Government’s land
reform programme;
- 51
(b)
the Maharashtra village woodlot programme has planted trees on panchayat
lands with the hope that landless and land-poor households will be
allocated the produce on a priority basis by the panchayat;
(c)
the Sukhomajri project has protected government forest land neighbouring
the village;
(d)
the Chipko Movement has taken up plantations on a variety of government
and community lands, but largely community lands; and
(e)
the St. Xavier's Behavioural Science Centre has tried to promote forestry
on land provided by the Government to a poor scheduled caste community
under an earlier land reform programme;
Table 8J analyses each of these projects from the point of view of
benefits to> landless and marginal farmers, the involvement of women and
conflicts.
Table 8.
Analysis of case study projects: Benefits to landless
and marginal farmers, involvement of women, and conflicts
Project
Benefits to land
less and marginal
farmers
Involvement
of women
Conflicts
West Bengal
farm forestry
Only those who
have benefited
from government
land distribution
programme
None
Not once the landless
have gained control of
the land given by the
Government
Maharashtra
village wood
lots
In principle as
members of the
community but not
in reality
None
Panchayat dominated by
groups who are not
interested in the needs
of the poor. Poor feel
their grazing lands being
taken away
Sukhomaj r i
watershed
development
As members of the
communi ty
Limited
1. Initially landed vs.
landless within the
village
2. Forest department vs.
village community over
benefits from protected
lands
Chipko
afforestation
As members of the
community
Substantial
Panchayat leaders vs. the
planters (in this case
Mahila Dais women’s organ
isation)
Bhal
afforestation
As a specific
target group
Limited
Violence between powerful
upper castes and lower
castes benefiting from the
project
8445d
(Z' <0-0
1
52
In West Bengal, many landless households have benefited from the
Government’s land reform programme, but in the four districts of southern
Bengal, namely Purulia, Bankura, Midnapore and Birbhum, which have extensive
tracts of laterised soils, the land that the poor have received is not
cultivable. Many such lands are held by farmers, and given the high prices of
timber in the wood-starved urban markets, there is an obvious confluence of
fortuitous circumstances for promoting tree farming on privately held lands.
Substantial proportion of the beneficiaries are very poor households who have
In some districts, a tree by the
benefited from the land reform programmes.
name of Acacia auriculiformis has been planted in large numbers, whose leaves
are used as fuel by the local population. The fuel crisis is so acute that
many households sweep the forest floor to collect leaves as fuel. Therefore,
poor households are happy if they can get an alternate supply of leaves while
keeping the wood for sale.
To prevent the wood from being stolen by
neighbouring villagers, the owners have even developed innovative ways of
guarding their plantations like collecting leaves from the plantation on a
particular day and sharing their leaves with everyone.
Leaves, to some
extent, meet the energy needs of the fuel-hungry households, but collecting
leaves from the ground will inevitably in the long run further deteriorate the
soil.
r
Such plantations have not reduced the grazing pressure on the forests
because, the choice of species being determined by the demands of the urban
market, the trees do not produce much fodder, The condition of the land has
reached such a degraded stage that even protection of the afforested tracts
has not increased grass yield substantially. Therefore, farm forestry in West
Bengal cannot claim to have improved the land use situation from an ecological
standpoint.
The approach of linking a land reform programme with afforestation is
workable only when the land being distributed is not suitable for
cultivation.
If the land is good for cultivation, then it ideally should be
brought under food crops rather than tree crops.
The high incomes being
generated from tree farming in West Bengal, because of high wood prices, may
even lead to conversion of good agricultural lands to tree plantations.
In
Nepura, a school teacher who had made a large sum of money by planting
eucalyptus on a barren piece of land (and who through his example induced
1,500 other families to do the same) has now purchased with his new-found
wealth good land on which rice was grown earlier - and a tubewell, and intends
to undertake short-rotation, irrigated tree farming on his new land. The West
Bengal farm forestry project, though benefiting many poor households, will
have to guard against promoting inappropriate land uses, a trend that has not
been easy to control in other states. Private forestry will in all likelihood
be cash-oriented tree farming and not ecological forestry, and the choice of
tree species will be to maximise profits rather than to meet multi-purpose,
household biomass needs.
The approach that is being widely suggested of
privatising the common through tree pattas (a lease on the trees rather than a
lease on the land) will inevitably lead to forestry governed by market demand
and not by basic survival needs or ecological prerequisites.
In any case,
further reduction of the area under common lands will adversely affect the
remaining poor and lead to greater pressure on the remaining common lands,
leading to an even more rapid degradation of these lands.
The best approach would therefore be to protect and enrich the common
lands while still retaining them as common lands, so that benefits can be
shared by the community, with provisions build in to ensure that the landless
and land-poor benefit on a priority basis.
The remaining four case studies
dealt with here document attempts to enrich common lands while preserving them
as commons. They cover two different situations:
8445d
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- 53 -
(a)
the Maharashtra village woodlot scheme and the Xavier’s afforestation
scheme on saline lands in the Bhal region of Gujarat have been undertaken
in villages with high social and economic stratification; and
(b)
the Chipko plantations and the Sukhomajri watershed protection have been
undertaken in villages with relatively less social and economic
stratification, where in a manner of speaking everyone shares poverty.
In the first set of projects, there is considerable mistrust and division
within the community, leading even to physical violence, while in the second
set of projects it has been relatively easier to bring about equity in sharing
the increased output of biomass from the protected areas.
The experience in Maharashtra clearly shows that if the poor have no
voice in the community, they will not benefit from afforestation. Trees have
been planted on village community lands in the villages of Maharashtra with
the intention of meeting the needs of the poor. But the panchayats, which
were expected to manage the plantations, are so riddled with corruption and
power politics that the interests of the poor in the village have nowhere been
protected.
In fact, with the introduction of block plantations on village
grazing lands, access by the poor to these common lands has actually been
denied; panchayat leaders, interested only in financial benefits from these
lands, are now auctioning the produce of these ’’commons”. The poor do not
even get the grass, which was an earlier benefit. A real danger is that when
productivity of the common lands is increased without the involvement and
empowerment of the poor, benefits are likely to be appropriated by the more
powerful.
But the case from Gujarat shows clearly that if afforestation is done by
directly focusing on the poor (not simply as members of the community), then
in highly stratified societies, this could lead to serious conflicts and
physical violence.
Entrenched and powerful interests will oppose schemes
which bring benefits to the poor and provide them with economic alternatives.
In the villages of Bhal, where afforestation has been done by co-operatives of
a scheduled caste, it has led to increasing violence by the upper caste,
culminating in a bloody massacre in the village of Golana.
The case studies from Sukhomajri and the high Himalayas show that the
protection and enrichment of the commons with the involvement of entire
communities work only when the following three conditions are observed:
1.
Control
Common lands must be brought under the control of the village community
and government agencies divested of their control over these lands.
2.
Unity
The entire community must be involved in the protection of the commons
under its control. If only a section of the community is involved in the
protection of a part of the commons, then at least that section of the
community must be homogeneous and it must gain clear control over that
part of the commons.
In other words, whichever group controls whatever
portion of the commons, that group must control the land completely and
must protect it jointly.
If only a few members of a group are left to
protect a common resource against the wishes of the rest, they will fail.
t
8445d
54 -
3.
Equity
If all members of a group are expected to protect a common resource, they
will do so only if all members benefit from the commons equally.
In Sukhomajri village, the water from a common forest watershed, a common
resource, is shared equally among the villagers.
This fact has linked the
interests of the people with the protection of the watershed.
Grazing has
completely stopped and people have sold their goats and started stall feeding
their buffaloes. As a result of this closure and protection, grass production
has increased tremendously and is leading to economic prosperity in the
village. In the afforestation works undertaken by the women’s organisations
in the Chipko Movement, again the benefits of protection from the common lands
are shared equitably. Women have evolved a simple procedure for distribution
of the resources by allocating specific days when protected common lands are
opened to villagers for collection of grass.
In both cases, the groups protecting and caring for the common lands have
had to assert their rights over the use and management of the lands. In the
case of Chipko, the women have had to deal with the village panchayat leaders
who legally control the commons.
In Sukhomajri, the villagers have demanded that the Forest Department,
which legally owns the watershed, give the village first rights in getting the
benefits of their protection work.
After years of insistence, the community
has been given the first right to cut grass (after payment of a royalty).
If village
Today, a large portion of forest lands are lying barren,
interest
in the
communities like Sukhomajri are not given such a vested
be
difficult
to
protection of their neighbouring forest lands, it will
regenerate these barren lands.
A note of caution must be added though to the Chipko and Sukhomajri
successes. However outstanding the plantations of the Mahila Mangal Dais in
the Chipko Movement and the protection of the Sukhomajri watershed, coupled
with equitable distribution of the increased biomass, it must nevertheless be
pointed out that these projects are located in areas of high rainfall with
soils still in good condition and hence high biomass productivity.
In
addition, both these areas possess a low population density with a high ratio
of common lands to private lands. Therefore, protection and care of commons
in both cases has led to rapid and substantial increases of biomass,
economically benefiting the protecting group equally rapidly and substantially.
In such conditions, it is presumably easier to bring about unity and
equity amongst the members of the group protecting and sharing the benefits of
a piece of common land. It would be instructive to study the social dynamics
in similar projects situated in areas with low rainfall and poor biomass
productivity. Unfortunately, the Chipko and Sukhomajri projects are so unique
In areas with
that we have not been able to find similar projects elsewhere,
low biological productivity, there may be no other option but to take the
approach of the Gujarat project whereby the poor alone get control of the
commons and of the increased benefits from them, The resentment and violence
that this apporoach will generate will in that case simply have to be dealt
with.
t
In all the cases studied, except that of Chipko, we found the role of
women was negligible.
Women have played a crucial role in the Chipko
plantations from determining the choice of species to the management of the
plantations, and women have given the project a clear bias towards household
subsistence needs rather than market demand.
Unfortunately, most government
bureaucracies find it impossible to approach and involve women in development
8445d
- 55
*
4
programmes,
Therefore, if women are to be involved in afforestation
programmes and are to bring their special perspectives to bear on
afforestation work. institutional innovations in forestry extension are
desperately needed. In most government-sponsored projects we have found very
poor communication between extension agents and all the powerless sections of
the country.
In Maharashtra village, the poor even expressed surprise when
told that the village woodlot was actually a panchayat plantation, The state
of communications with women is even more abysmal.
Neither government
extension nor conventional village organisations are yet capable of dealing
with the male-female tension that may arise by bringing women into community
affairs.
Both the Sukhomajri and Chipko experiences show that the afforestation of
common lands by village communities may demand the creation of new forms of
community organisations like the Mahila Mangal Dal or the Hill Resource
Management Society, which are more democratic and participatory in nature.
The elected village councils have in most cases failed to bring about unity
within the village community and to represent the interests of the poor by
ensuring equity in the distribution of benefits from development programmes.
The choice of these particular case studies should not leave the
impression either that most afforestation programmes in India are trying to
take into account the needs of the landless and the land-poor.
On the
contrary, all the projects chosen for the study are exceptional in that they
make an attempt to do so, and were selected for study precisely for that
reason. Most afforestation projects in India in fact completely fail to take
the needs of the poor into account.
*
8445d
PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS
WEP research working papers are preliminary documents circulated
informally in a limited number of copies solely to stimulate discussion and
critical comment.
They are restricted and should not be cited without
permission.
A set of selected WEP research working papers, completed by
annual supplements, is available in microfiche form for sale to the public;
orders should be sent to ILO Publications, International Labour Office, CH
1211 Geneva 22, Switzerland.
This list includes many, but not all, papers
which exist or may be issued in microfiche form.
a
WEP 10/WP.l
Land reform in Asia with particular reference to Pakistan,
Philippines and Thailand - Zubeida Ahmad
the
sexual
division
of
the
labour
WP.2
Reproduction, production and
Lourdes Beneria
WP.3
Employment and income generation in new settlement projects R. Weitz
WP.4
Research on participation of the poor in development Md. Anisur Rahman
WP.5
Participatory development efforts in rural Bangladesh: A case
study of the experiences in three areas - Mahabub Hossain, Raisul
Awal Mahmood and Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad
WP.6
Agricultural co-operatives in North Vietnam - Amit Bhaduri
WP.7
Sind Hari Committee, 1930-12970: A peasant movement? Mahmood Hasan Khan
WP.8
Land reform and peasant associations in Ethiopia - A case study
of two widely differing regions - Alula Abate and Tesfaye Teklu
WP.9
Transition to collective agriculture, and peasant participation North Viet Nam, Tanzania and Ethiopia - Md. Anisur Rahman
WP.10 Rural development planning and the sexual division of labour: a
case study of a Moslem Hausa village in northern Nigeria Richard Longhurst
WP.ll Peasant struggle in a feudal setting - a study of the
determinants of the bargaining power of tenants and small farmers
in five villages of District Attock, Pakistan, 1980 Nigar Ahmad
WP.12 Participatory processes and action of the rural poor in Anta,
Santiago Roca with the collaboration of Miguel Bachrach
Peru
and Josi Servat
WP.13 Women in agriculture: Peasant production and proletarianisation
in three Andean regions - Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon
de Leal
2
WP.14
Rural women in Thailand; From peasant girls to Bangkok masseuses
- Pasuk Phongpaichit
WP.15
Economic role and status of women - A case study of women in the
beedi industry in Allahabad - Zarina Bhatty
WP.16
Housewives produce for
Narsapur - Maria Mies
the world market
The lace-makers of
a
WP.17
Survival strategies of rural women traders or a woman’s place is
in the market: Four case studies from north-western Sleman in
the special region of Yogyakarta - Nancy Lee Peluso
WP.18
The position of women workers in the plantation sector in Sri
Lanka - Rachel Kurian
WP.19
A preliminary study of women rubber estate workers in Peninsular
Malaysia - Noeleen Heyzer Fan
WP.20
Participation experiences in the countryside:
Chile - Sergio Gomez
WP.21
Agricultural modernisation and Third World women: Pointers from
the literature and an empirical analysis - Bina Agarwal
WP.22
Grass-roots
self-reliance
in
Shramik,
Sanghatana,
Dhulia
District, India - P.V. Paranjape, Vijay Kanhere, Nirmala Sathe,
Sudhindra Kulkarni, Sujata Gothoskar
WP.23
Fuel availability, nutrition and women’s work in highland Peru:
Three case studies from contrasting Andean communities - Sarah
L. Skar
WP.24
Grass-roots self-reliance in two rural locations in Sri Lanka:
Organisations of betel and coir yarn producers - S. Tilakaratna
WP.25
Grass-roots self-reliance initiatives in Malaysia: A case study
of Kampung Batu’s struggle for land - Lim Teck Ghee and Tan
Phaik Leng
WP.26
The struggle toward self-reliance of organised, resettled women
in the Philippines
WP.27
Conscientising rural disadvantaged peasants in Bangladesh:
intervention through group action - A case study of Proshika Mosharraf Hossain
WP.28
Migrant labour and women: The case of Ratnigiri - Rajani X. Desai
WP.29
The theory and practice
Muhammad Anisur Rahman
of
participatory
A case study in
action
research
9
3 -
WP.30
Young women workers in export industries: The case of
semiconductor industry in southeast Asia - Elizabeth Eisold
the
WP.31
Rural households headed by women: A priority
development - Nadia H. Youssef, Carol B. Hetler
concern
of
WP.32
Marginalisation and the induction of women into wage labour: The
case of Indian agriculture - Ruchira Chatterji
WP.33
Changing patterns of rural women’s employment, production and
reproduction in China - Elisabeth Croll
WP.34
Indian women in subsistence and agricultural labour - Maria Mies
WP.35
The rural energy crisis,
crisis, women’s work and family welfare:
Perspectives and approaches to action - Elizabeth Cecelski
WP.36
Differentiation among the rural poor and its bearing on
solidarity and organisational development: A study of five
locations in India - A research collective
WP.37
The
animator
in
participatory
rural
experiences from Sri Lanka - S. Tilakaratna
WP.38
Crisis de energia rural y trabajo
ecologicas del Peru - Elsa Alcantara
WP.39
The rural energy crisis in Ghana: Its implications on women’s
work and household survival - Elizabeth Ardayfio
WP.40
The impact of rural transformation
Mozambique - Stephanie Urdang
WP.41
Rural Women and Social Structures in Change: A Case Study of
Women’s Work and Energy in West Java, Indonesia - A research
collective
WP.42
Women in the estate sector of Malawi: The
industries - Megan Vaughan and Graham Chipande
WP.43
international
markets
and
labour
Rural
development,
a
case
study
of
1
’
Ouija
region,
Morocco
appropriation by sex:
Lourdes Beneria
WP.44
Change in domestic fuel consumption in central Mexico and its
relation to employment and nutrition - Margaret I. Evans
WP.45
Women workers
Leela Gulati.
WP.46
Rural women and industrial home work in Latin America: Research
review and agenda - Maria de los Angeles Crummett.
w
in Kerala’s
development:
Some
en
areas
femenino
on
tres
peasant
electronic industry
tea
women
and
in
tobacco
Gita Sen and
xl
- 4 -
WP.47
Des initiatives paysannes de developpement en Afrique: une
auto-evaluation de trois experiences au Senegal, au Burkina Faso
et au Rwanda - Textes reunis sous la direction de Philippe Egger.
WP.48
Glimpses of the "other Africa" - Md. Anisur Rahman.
- Media
11467.pdf
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