The British established a professional forest service and nationalized India’s forestry resources as long ago as 1865, under its then Forest Act. Over the next 100 years, much of the country’s uncultivated land area was placed under the management of the Indian Forest Service and state forest departments. Throughout this period, large scale extraction of timber was resorted to as the primary supplier of wood and was used to lay India’s vast railroads, build cities, truck bodies and also utilized in making domestic furniture. The private sector and state agencies gradually established control over the forest resources at the cost of the rights of indigenous forest dwellers. Protests and opposition to state monopoly by the tribal dwellers of forests were suppressed by military or police action even though conflicts persisted over the years.

Rapidly disappearing wildlife and forests led to the passing of the Forest Conservation Act, placing tight restrictions on felling of trees in 1980. However, only with the passing of the  National Forest Policy Act in 1988, the usufruct rights of forest dwellers were acknowledged for the first time. By the early 1990’s, only ten percent of the land area had a good vegetative cover out of the 23% of national land area designated as public forests. Government forest lands were under human pressure from tens of thousands of cattle and an estimated 200 million people directly dependent on forest products.

With the rapid dwindling of the forest cover, international concern took expression through the commitment of millions of dollars into social forestry projects over the past 30 years. However, the social forestry initiative has produced very limited results as the forest cover has continued to dwindle. Government planners and forest officers recognize the need to intensify forest protection through community participation.

In 1990, the Ministry of Environment and Forests passed a resolution extending specific rights and responsibilities to villagers over the public forest domain. Over the past decade, more than 17 Indian states have issued orders with guidelines for the implementation of Joint Forest Management (JFM) schemes. The failure of the community forestry programme led to the belief that the only way forest could be protected was through JFM and by the mid 1990’s, US$150 million (30% of all donor support to the forestry sector) had been earmarked for supporting JFM.

It is estimated that at present more than 20,000 villages have some or the other form of forest protection communities, many of which are associated with each other as a loosely organized federation and effectively control access to an estimated five percent of India’s total forest area, measuring approximately 2 million hectares.

Although the Global Environment Facility thematic areas for the Small Grants Programme include consideration of projects on forestry as related to the conservation of biodiversity and climate change prevention, social forestry projects are generally looked at with disfavour in view of their past record. On the other hand, social action by rural communities to prevent deforestation and timber harvesting by private sector businesses is looked at with greater favour as a more likely strategy which is useful for regeneration of degraded forest area.

The difficulty with social forestry, as has been observed over the past 30 years, basically revolves around the need to cut the regenerated timber if any monetary benefit is to accrue to the villagers. Thus, social forestry and agroforestry became an activity similar to agriculture wherein trees were cultivated and sold for commercial purposes. This, in other words, did not result in the increase in the area under forests as was the originally anticipated outcome of the social forestry initiative.

It is in this connection that an organisation, BAIF Development Foundation, in Maharashtra, a pilot phase SGP grantee has developed a novel method for carbon sequestration. In 1997, BAIF initiated a project titled "Promotion of Agroforestry amongst small farmers by the establishment of agroforestry units". For all practical purposes, the project's objective was to establish 12 agro forestry units on 24 hectares of wasteland in the Valsad district of Gujarat and the Mysore district of Karnataka.

It envisaged raising of horticulture plants like cashew and mango on the land belonging to marginal farmers and tribals. The idea was to cultivate mango (Rajapuri and Keshar varieties) alongwith cashew (Anacardium occidentale), jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus), papaya (Carica papaya), curryleaf, tamarind, palanji, eucalyptus, Acacia nilotica, Acacia auriculiformis, Gliricidia and teak as a strategy for composite production of timber, fodder, fruit and nitrogen-fixation while promoting carbon sequestration.

The idea behind this approach of setting up horticulture units was that such units, supported by live-fencing using Acacia nilotica, eucalyptus and teak, appears to be an innovative method for carbon sequestration and ensuring that once the trees grow up they are not felled as the fruits of the trees provide income to the farmers as also food. In this way, the project not only addressed global warming but also provided for the livelihood development of the local community. In a recent field visit, it was observed that these marginal farmers perceived substantial benefits accruing from these plantations, the extent of which can be gauged from the fact that many of the farming families have dismantled and shifted their houses to the middle of their horticulture plots to be able to provide better protection from animals and also prevent human pilferage.

The fact that all over the Western Ghat and the Eastern Ghat, in areas were soil moisture is low resulting in arid conditions, the monetary value perceived from the cultivation of mango and cashew is very high and thus, in great demand from the farmers. Hence, horticulture plantations surrounded by live fencing of leguminous trees yielding fodder and fixing nitrogen are important strategies that can replace the social forestry project with a more successful alternative mechanism of promoting agro forestry for livelihood development and carbon sequestration.

Another interesting project relevant to the regeneration of forest is being implemented by a group headed by
Dr. Erach Bharucha from the Bharati Vidyapeeth Institute of Environment Education and Research, Pune. Although the project, supported under the pilot phase of SGP, dealt with establishment of nurseries in 20 schools and building-up of the capacity of school teachers for imparting environmental education and environmental education curriculum development etc., in another project, VIEER has successfully regenerated natural forests in a restricted protected area. They could possibly be the first group who have successfully regenerated a natural forest in a degraded ecosystem through initially planting Acacia and Eucalyptus (which are fast growing species) to create the tree-canopy under which natural shrubs, herbs etc. forming the undergrowth of pristine forests were planted. What is important is that once the undergrowth started flourishing, the Acacia and Eucalyptus trees started dying off and got replaced by the natural forest tree cover.

In this process a natural ecosystem, not distinguishable from a pristine forest, was created over a short duration of a decade. This is indeed a novel mechanism as natural regeneration in protected areas for forest ecosystem may take as many as 50 years to regenerate. While this strategy for forest ecosystem regeneration is not only novel but faster, such initiatives need to be replicated in other areas by other groups.

The challenge now is to continue the transition process through replication of such innovative experiments as have been described above by launching projects on organising local communities to protect and regenerate degraded forest resources, JFM, promotion of agro horticulture and reforestation by strategies similar to those use by
Dr. Bharucha and BAIF. Moreover, it is necessary to replace timber cultivation programmes in the name of afforestation by community managed multi product micro-forestry planning and development. These are the challenges facing the creation of new collaborative efforts between rural communities and Government agencies to oversee the enhancement of the type of vegetation presently found in pristine parts of the public forest domain.

Coupled with these methods, the emergence of Community Forest Management (CFM) programmes and policies over the past two decades is a significant attempt at reversing a century old trend towards greater state control. These new policy directions, while often highly tentative and limited in providing meaningful rights to the local communities, are significant in sending a new message to Government officials and forest department staff.

The 73rd and 74th Amendments also address a new policy supporting land reform and local governance through the Panchayati Raj system and indicate a larger political desire for decentralization as well as local empowerment.

According to the deliberations of the Fifth Asia Forest Network meeting held in December, 1996 and documented by Mark Poffenberger, Peter Walpole, Emmanuel D’Silva, Karen Lawrence and Arvind Khare, during the past 10 years there has been a recognition among planners, NGOs, donors and researchers that India is now committed to pursuing policies supporting the greater involvement of communities in the protection and management of public forest lands.

This transition may take a few decades and involve giving rights and responsibilities to local communities for at least 50 per cent of the public forest domain, representing tens of millions of hectares. This historic reallocation of resource rights and responsibilities may take some more decades to evolve into practical procedures and implementable actions. Since there are no existing precedents for these changes to occur, substantial experimentation with development of local institutions and action plans needs to be tried out to gain meaningful experience, based on which actual measures could be implemented on a countrywide basis. Thus, a learning mechanism is needed to help collect and synthesize field experiences, interpret it and feed it back to policy makers, planners, donors, forestry officials, NGOs and community organisations. Projects for experimentation and development of measures designed to shift responsibilities for managing forest resources with local communities are thus likely to find favour with
donor agencies. q