PERSPECTIVES

Village Communities and Their Common Property Forests

P J Dilip Kumar

This is a study of three villages in the Aravalli Hills of south Haryana, which have full title over the common lands and forests and have taken three radically different alternatives. One community, Mangar, is on the verge of losing the battle to the allure of real estate. The second village, Zir, is still condently preserving the forest as its common property, and the third, Bhondsi, appears to be divided in interests and has decided to let the forest department do the protection for the immediate future. What do these three different trajectories tell us about conserving our forests?

ver the past couple of decades, social activists have built up the view that forests cannot be protected unless the community has title over them and think of them as their own (e g, Gadgil and Guha 1992). The theory goes that the collective will of the community will prevail over private interests, and the forests will be preserved. Under state control, they hold that the forests are nobodys property, and that this is the main reason for the fact that around half of Indias forests are in various stages of degradation. The answer, according to them, lies in handing over forests to the community, a view also espoused in many international forums such as the Rio Declaration on forests that many countries have accepted as a non-binding agreement. In India, this is sought to be done through empowering legislation like the Forest Rights Act (FRA) passed in 2006 in order to set right the historic wrong done to poor village communities (especially tribal) when the reserved forests were notied under the Forest Act and the rights of the people restricted. Forest Conservation Indias foresters have always had a different reading of the forest history of the subcontinent, and hold that the rights and privileges were systematically investigated and listed out at the time of notication, and that forests cannot be conserved unless there is some amount of regulation (Brandis 1897). India is one of the few countries in the developing world that has been able to stem the tide of deforestation during the last three decades, and this is because of the sound framework of law and judicial vigilance by our highest courts combined with the presence of a well-trained, disciplined and eld-oriented forest force on the ground.

This article was prepared courtesy of an adjunct professorship awarded by the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore in 2013. The visits to the eld were made possible by the kind courtesy of colleagues in the forest department. I am personally responsible for any errors in fact or judgment that may remain. P J Dilip Kumar ( pjdilip@gmail.com) is a retired director general of forests, Government of India.
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In addition, there is a massive effort at enlisting the cooperation of the people through a comprehensive programme of peoples participation, popularly known as joint forest management (JFM). There are some 1,18,000 of these joint forest management committees (JFMC) all over the country, looking after some 20 million hectares of forest (FRI 2011). The JFM villages have made signal contributions in controlling forest res and other damages, improving the biological condition of the forests and in taking up forest-based livelihood activities. They also achieved efciencies in energy use to reduce dependence on hacking of the forests for fuelwood, controlled as well as reduced the free-range grazing of unproductive cattle in the forests and improved the living conditions in their communities. They have controlled erosion of forests by illegal encroachment, even removed such encroachments by their own compatriots and gradually returned these encroached patches to forest. They have raised the environmental awareness of their own members, of the forest departments, and the rural community in general. Thanks to the efforts of the village communities and forest staff, the area under forests has more or less stabilised and even increased marginally over the past two decades. Along with forest protection, these committees have also been the vehicle for a modest level of social development through small interventions called entry-point activities, and have provided capital for the operation of self-help groups (SHGs) or savings-and-loan groups that circulate the seed money many times over through small loans to the JFMC members with generally very high recovery levels. Foresters do not understand why they are being demonised and vilied so badly by those who, in their view, do not have a personal experience of the pressures against the forests, when in fact the forest departments have undertaken such a massive reconstruction of their own functioning, and fashioned a system and an approach of working with the communities that has met with so much appreciation and success on the ground.
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The foresters of the country, while appreciating fully and wholeheartedly the need to give title to those who have been occupying their lands for generations, are worried that the forest resources assessment is in danger of being used to parcel out unoccupied forest. They are also apprehensive of a rapid erosion of the nations forests, if a closing date is not xed immediately for ling of claims under the FRA, and if the communities holding forest rights are not made legally responsible for safeguarding the forests, instead of leaving the forest departments to become the scapegoat. This article describes an especially interesting case of three villages in the Aravalli Hills of south Haryana, faced with the challenge of managing their own, privately held, common property forest resources, and how each community has come up with its own different response. Mangar on the Edge I start with Mangar village, which is not far from Gurgaon, the second city of the National Capital Region, situated off the new super expressway to Faridabad. This village has been in the news of late because real estate development is threatening a centuries-old sacred forest or bani, which is one of the few remaining patches of the natural vegetation of the Aravalli range, a type of edaphic climax, classied as the Anogeissus pendula (locally, dhau) deciduous forest type by Champion and Seth (1968). The special feature of the Aravallis is that much of the non-cultivated land, while remaining under private title, is notied under Section 4 or 5 of the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA) 1900, and accompanying rules. Those empower the state to temporarily regulate, restrict or prohibit certain activities and take up reforestation and soil conservation programmes in the interests of erosion control and regulation of water ow in the chos (rills) that runs down the Siwalik mountains carrying a lot of silt and rubble. The state may further require owners to take up suitable measures to check soil and water erosion. While not all the private hill forest may be notied under the PLPA, it may still be classied as
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ghair-momken (not potentially cultivable or not suitable for land revenue). These hill forests are actually owned by the individuals in the villages, and have been traditionally managed jointly as a common property resource (CPR) for fodder, fuel, small timber, grass and water harvesting. There is plenty of wildlife in these hills, such as nilgai (blue bull) and deer, and even tigers up to the pre-independence days. Today, of course, this land is enormously valuable for developing residential and commercial buildings situated so close to the capital region and getting better road connections by the day. Mangar village is doubly special, because some 5,000 acres in the valley is their bani. It has a thick cover of the old natural vegetation with species like the dhau and local kikar, and the villagers have traditionally not extracted any material from it (although they have worked the surrounding, ghair-momken, private forest intermittently). The land titles in this bani appear complicated: originally, these private lands (malkiyat) were held as common property, not demarcated into individual plots, even though each holder had his own title. In 1972, the agriculturists, apparently on the instigation of land developers, petitioned for the right to use their land parcels in the bani area, and as the old people explained during my visit, the whole bani became divided into individual holdings for a paltry sum. Thus, the land, which was originally shyamalat (land held communally), was gradually sold off by the malik (landlords) to outsiders. The irony of this was that the bani area was not notied under the PLPA, so that it had not even the legal protection that the surrounding malkiyat (private hill forest) had, even though for the villagers, the bani was sacred and spiritual. Another irony was that the division of the bani was done under the umbrella of the Land Consolidation (and Prevention of Fragmentation) Act, but actually this Act is meant for rearranging and reassigning a tract of occupied land with numerous small, fragmented individual plots, and is not, patently, applicable to a land which is already held in one piece (such as the bani). In this case, the
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application should have been made under the Revenue Act for allotment of individual plots of land, and this would have come under the lens of the Forest Conservation Act, if intended for non-forest uses. Other villages in the district have also done this privatisation, using each others court orders as justication. Unfortunately, it appears that the chakbandi or division done in the 1980s by the revenue department cannot be further challenged as it is time-barred, but the villagers are still trying to get the damage reversed by appealing to the administration that the bani should be notied under Sections 4 and 5 of the PLPA, so that the whole of the Aravalli hill forest (apart from the agricultural land) is protected. The matter has some urgency, because this entire tract is included for urban development under one or other master plan. Right now only the ghair-momken areas outside the bani proper have this status, and the bani continues to be vulnerable, except for the interest of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, which has restrained the state government from diverting forest areas to non-forestry uses without going through the due process under the Forest Conservation Act, 1980.1 Now the Mangar community has given the list of plots to be counted within the bani, and in turn, the forest department seems to have asked the state government to declare these lands as protected under the PLPA. The state has apparently accepted this in principle and put the lands under a Mangar bani zone, but the bani has not yet been notied under Sections 4 and 5 of the PLPA so far, which gives cause for an apprehension that the executive order can be reversed any day and the bani put up for development again. The villagers now want the bani to be safeguarded, and they say that the villagers have to be involved in this, but at the same time, they acknowledge that it is difcult to take action against individuals, who are the fellow citizens staying in the same village. Many of the individual holders had already sold off their plots in the bani, even though they could not actually pinpoint their individual lots in
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the hillside following the partitioning (over the period 1980 to 1985). There had been an attempt to form a village forest committee (VFC), but the villagers felt that the conditions of JFM were too tough to follow, and the VFC proposition fell through. They ask, if the government ofcials, with all their powers, cannot take cognisance of and prevent illicit activities, how can they expect local village residents to do so? On my prompting that there is a general feeling, right up to the Parliament, that the forest department should not be booking cases against the common man, they reiterate that the local people cannot do these things, only government ofcials like the police or forest staff can do it; village people cannot serve this role. Land is being given away in the malkiyat, even in the Sections 4 and 5 notied areas. The problem seems to be that the malkiyat is not shown as forest in the records. The districts foresters have some interesting insights into the problem of preserving the bani and the community forests in general. The only law which will come to its defence will be the Forest Conservation Act, as there is no option of compounding an offence under this Act. In fact, this Act is meant to curb abetment by ofcials in diversion of forestlands without due process and permission of the central government, and not so much for acts done by the common people (for instance, an attempt to break up existing forest), which would have to be proceeded against under the relevant state laws like the Forest Act or the PLPA, which is obviously difcult in view of the lack of political support for any such action, and the general feeling (right up to Parliament) that the forest department has been too high-handed in its relations with the local communities everywhere. Zir: Holding the Line Mangar village is on the brink of losing its sacred forest, despite being a relatively small, ethnically homogeneous, community with high connectedness to the resource (all supposedly factors that would have increased the chances of a sustained CPR management arrangement). In contrast, I cite two other communities in the Aravallis that have found
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other options. One is Zir or Jhir (named for the stream, or jharna, that comes down from the hills) on the state border with Rajasthan in the district Mewat, the land of the Meo Muslims. Its village square is dominated not by a grand mosque (as one would expect in this Muslim-dominated tract), but a Shiv mandir, a Hindu temple, which is managed by members from both the communities together. The village holds some 1,400 acres as malikon ka jangal (the jungle of the landlords), in this ward (sub-village), Dhaund-Kala, which originally had only 14 households, both Meo and non-Meo, in Dhaund-Kala, but now has something like 300 houses. All the villagers are aware that with the trees come fodder, grass, grazing, small timber, and rewood (naturally), water in their streams and in their wells. No one is allowed to cut any tree, and only dry fallen material could be taken for fuelwood. There is no system of organised fellings, no forest department working, and no sale of material from the forest. They also get the benet of wage labour through the works of soil and water conservation and afforestation that the departments (mainly forest) take up in these hillsides. Perhaps most crucially, relations with the forest department are excellent, despite the fact that the forest belongs to the maliks and the department has its own personnel and rules and procedures. They are aware that it is the forest staff that is actually protecting the forest from illicit fellings, and without them there would have been considerable removals and conicts with others, such as the people from across the border who might make incursions. They are also comfortable with the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) training centre here (they have given their land for it), since no demands for fuelwood or other things are made by the CRPF platoons as they come with cooking gas and rations for their 15-day tours of stay. The forest is notied under Sections 4 and 5 of the PLPA, which adds another layer of protection. Bhondsi Working with the State My third case was Bhondsi village which is not far from Gurgaon off the Sohna highway. During the early 1990s, former
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prime minister Chandra Shekhar created a retreat for himself and his followers in this village; a couple of thousand people used to be with him to keep him company and look after his security and comforts! Later, the division bench of the Supreme Court ordered the Haryana government to take possession of some 500 acres (200 hectares) of land which was originally gifted to him by the Bhondsi panchayat,2 and subsequently, by an order dated 19 April 2002, that this land be delivered to the gram panchayat and utilised in such a manner which does not contravene the provisions of the Forest Conservation Act.3 Today it is all but abandoned, with a few brick and glass structures mouldering into ruin (including a edgling college building), and a cooling lake. The hill forests still have plenty of wildlife, from leopards on down the chain, and of course, nilgai, peafowl and smaller animals are plenty. This land once again belongs to the villagers, but after the democratic raja left, they decided to hand over some 588 acres to the forest department for safekeeping under Section 38 of the Indian Forest Act (for a specied period, to revert back to the panchayat in 2019), rather than divide it into individual holdings (like the Mangar residents did). There may be possibilities of using this estate as a nature resort or education centre, but the forest department does not have the required funds, nor is the panchayat putting in any money. Interestingly, this is a panchayat that believes in not taking any money from the government, and subsists solely on the rent and interest it gets for panchayat land leased or sold to the police and paramilitary forces. The community is composed of mainly Thakurs (the martial caste), every family having someone in uniform, and this may explain both their afnity for the law and order forces and their aversion to government grants. Summing Up So there we have the account, brief as it is, of three villages in the same belt, which have full title over the common lands and forest, and have taken three radically different alternatives.
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The residents of all three villages, much to our surprise and gratication, are trying to hold on to their common forestlands as a collective; one community, Mangar, is on the verge of losing the battle because its residents have fallen prey to the lure of money, being so close to the national capital region with its rocketing real estate values, in spite of the forest having the sanctity of a spiritual legacy. The second village, Zir, is still sufciently far away from the real estate rush to be able to condently state a rm intention to hold on to the forest as a common property, and showing besides that our major communities can live together and respect each others religious values. The third, Bhondsi, is relatively well-off, but appears to be divided in interests, and has safely decided to let the forest department do the protection for the immediate future. The village communities (as at Mangar) are helpless in actually defending their common property forest and jungle, even in cases where it has been a sacred grove for many decades. Neither the Bani nor the private forest (the malkiyat) in the hillsides has protection under the Indian Forest Act, so clearly an alternate legal framework has to be invoked to protect the forest. Ironically, the Mangar sacred forest itself does not have even the protection of the Punjab Land Preservation Act. So the only possible legal basis to protect this patch of ancient Aravalli forest is the much-reviled Forest Conservation Act, 1980, which to many is the epitome of the high-handedness of the centre. Neither community nor panchayat are of much use in this situation. In the other two cases, where things have not come to as sorry a pass as in Mangar, the role of the forest department is signicant and supportive. In none of the cases is there any feeling that the forest department is a stranger; on the whole they do recognise that rules have to be imposed, and that it is difcult for the community itself to do the policing and enforcement. The inference is quite clear that it is the forest department, supported by the Forest Conservation Act 1980 and the central government, that is, the safeguard for these forests, and that the panchayats play a marginal role in this, and the village communities by
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themselves do not have a legal basis to ensure the integrity of the resource. The question arises, why some communities are holding on to their forest resources, while others have been less effective despite their aspirations. The usual verdict is that the chances of successful CPR management are higher in communities that are ethnically more homogeneous, of small to medium size, having autonomy in decision-making, and highly dependent on the resource (Saxena 1997; Ravindranath and Sudha 2004). On all these counts, Mangar village ought to have been the most effective, but actually we see that it is the ethnically diverse Zir that has maintained the CPR in joint community management, while the much larger, less dependent Bhondsi has found a way to temporarily safeguard their forests. Perhaps Mangar village has too much variance in individuals interests, combined with a lack of condence in the collective body or in the leadership. In Bhondsi, there are suggestions of high divergence of interests (newcomers will lose out against older residents if the estate is privatised), but the community seems to be cohesive in decision-making and there seems to be some sort of leadership (perhaps because of the army afliations). In Zir, there seems to be high community cohesiveness and involvement, despite the ethnic diversity; we do not have any specic evidence about the quality of leadership. Perhaps the crucial factor is that the Zir and Bondsi communities have found a way to mesh with other agencies, especially the forest department, to achieve something like Ostroms (1990) multiple layers of nested enterprises. This gives a higher level of legitimacy and effectiveness to the rules and practices they have set in place, and keep intruders at bay. Bhondsi has moved farther in this direction, by transferring custody completely to the forest department. Mangar, on the other hand, has not apparently found a way to install a set of rules or enforce them. The development agencies are bent on commercial exploitation of the land, and obviously the maliks of Mangar have abetted this process by not protesting at the right time against diversion of their jungle malkiyat. Autonomy and empowerment are apparently not the deciding factor in
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conservation: even the sentimental and other attachments do not seem to have counted for much, as Mangar would have been expected to have the highest value for the sacred forest, but actually they have been the least effective. Perhaps we can take heart from the evidence that immediate economic returns, ethnic homogeneity and the like are not always deciding factors. Here we see that communities which do not t into this pattern are also able to consciously and communally take a decision to protect their common property forest resources, and that the more they collaborate with other arms of the government, the more effective this can be. All this points to the basic correctness of the JFM approach of jointness and nested levels of authority, and the attention to non-forestry issues through the entrypoint activities, which takes into account both the short-term and long-term interests and thus is likely to be more lasting and resilient than a regime that depends on fortuitous circumstances, outside funding, or charismatic leadership here and there. Perhaps even the panchayati raj protagonists would prot by looking at the JFM model to make village selfgovernance and peoples empowerment a reality rather than mere rhetoric.
Notes
1 2 Centre Seeks Mangar Report, The Times of India, New Delhi, 2 April 2012. The Bhondsi Project, T K Rajalakshmi, Frontline, Volume 18, Issue 16, 4 August 2001; available at: http://www.frontline.in/static/ html/1816/ 18161220.htm http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1980462/

References
Brandis, Dietrich (1897): Forestry in India. Origins and Early Developments (Dehradun: Natraj Publishers). Champion, Sir Harry G and S K Seth (1968): A Revised Survey of the Forest Types of India (Delhi: Government of India). FRI, Dehradun (2011): Status of Joint Forest Management in India (as on June 2011) (Dehradun: Forest Research Institute). Gadgil, Madhav and Ramachandra Guha (1992): This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Ostrom, Elinor (1990): Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Universities Press). Ravindranath, N H and P Sudha (2004): Joint Forest Management in India. Spread, Performance and Impact (Hyderabad: Universities Press). Saxena, N C (1997): The Saga of Participatory Forest Management in India (Bogor, Indinesia: Centre for International Forestry Research).
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