What the little people know

What the little people know

* Inspired by the Chipko movement, the villagers of Jardhargaohn in Uttaranchal set up a forest protection committee to check indiscriminate felling by their own folk. After 18 years of protection, several hundred acres of forest have regenerated. Botanical assessments show the forest to be one of the most diverse in the region.
* The Kantia tribe of Kerela had valuable knowledge about the use of the plant Trichopus zevlancicus that resulted in the development of a herbal drug. Researchers who helped develop the drug entered into a benefit sharing arrangement with the Kantias. However, the state forest department, which controls most of the land where the plant grows, is reluctant to allow its collection.
* When a local NGO exhorted Bhil tribals of village Dev Somnath in Dungarpur, Rajasthan, to reforest their degraded common land five years back, village elders sprinkled vermilion around the plantation area and declared it sacred. They enforced a ban on tree felling and grazing of trees below a certain age. The forest has now regenerated.

There’s a simple acronym that explain s these miracles in forestry: JFM. The mantra of Joint Forest Management has captured the imagination of a generation of planners, bureaucrats and non-governmental and has led to a considerable expansion of green cover.

The examples were cited at a recent conference of foresters held at the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM) in Bhopal. It’s tantamount to admitting, finally, that indigenous traditions contain lessons which contemporary systems of forest management can’t afford to ignore.

Claus Seeland of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which recently conducted a study of indigenous knowledge and tribal forest life in Orissa, warned that ‘‘By and large, independent forest dwelling communities manage their habitat on their own. Whereas the national forest policy administers resources on behalf of an anonymous social demand. The former have, to a greater extent, achieved continuity where the latter will fail because the forest service is an administration with a colonial legacy of timber extraction.’’

The Bishnois of Rajasthan proved this when they forced the arrest and prosecution of actor Salman Khan for shooting blackbuck in their sacred groves, the Orans, three years back, pointed out Deep Narayan Pandey, convener of the International Network on Ethnoforestry. ‘‘The Orans today survive in the Thar Desert only because of the Bishnois’ commitment to defend their belief in the sacredness of the groves.’’

The movement for involving local communities in the management of forests in India started in India in the mid-1970s. Madhav Gadgil’s pioneering study of sacred groves of the hill around Pune showed that ‘conservation from below’ worked better than ‘conservation from above’.

Its validity was acknowledged by the National Forest Policy of 1990, which gave local communities the authority to participate in the management of their forests. as well as specified their rights. Since then, local forest protection committees in 22 of the 27 states under the Joint Forest Management (JFM) programmes are managing nearly 10 million ha forestland in India.

But the experiment hasn’t been uniformly successful. Ashish Kothari of Kalpvriksha, a Pune-based NGO, pointed out that JFM may have helped locals gain sustainable livelihood in some cases. ‘‘But they suffer from a lack of actual power sharing and from the same exclusionist focus that characterised conventional policies.’’

Indigenous traditions not only incorporate practices suitable for sustainable forest management, but also rely on shared cultural and religious values of the community. Dr Mark Poffenberger, Director, Community Forestry International, says, ‘‘To be effective, any project trying to integrate indigenous knowledge should be based on the principle that indigenous knowledge can’t be dissociated from its cultural and institutional setting.’’

Prof. K.F. Wiersum, head of the Forest Policy and Management Group in the department of environmental science of Netherland’s Wageningen University, also sounded out a word of caution for zealous supporters of India’s JFM programmes.

According to him, incorporating indigenous knowledge in any natural resource management scheme could be based on different types of values attributed to it: encyclopaedic values (relating to their knowledge), efficiency values (relating to their socio-cultural milieu) and emancipation values (relating to their empowerment). ‘‘Basing JFM schemes solely on the encyclopaedic value disempowers local communities from their traditions and is insensitive to the cultural and institutional settings within which the indigenous knowledge evolved,’’ he warns.