By Subrat Kumar Sahu

The first of a series on community forestry initiatives in Orissa, researched as part of the Infochange Media Fellowship 2009, discusses how India’s forests came to be controlled and owned by the state after 1855, placing the state in perpetual conflict with forest-dependent communities

Read Part 2 of this series here
Read Part 3 of this series here
Read Part 4 of this series here
Read Part 5 of this series here
Read Part 6 of this series here

Battleground forests: Who owns them? 

On a chilly, moonlit evening some time in December 2007, we were sitting by the fire in Gorata village in the Niyamgiri mountains in south Orissa. Surrounded by incredibly dense primary forests, at 3,000 ft above sea level, Dodi Pusika, the village headman, was explaining to us the daily life of the Dongria Kondhs -- an aboriginal tribe listed as ‘primitive’ (a colonial construct) in the official records -- who have inhabited the Niyamgiri for generations. During the discussion, I uttered what the gathering of about 25 Dongria men and women must have thought was an absurd statement: “Do you have a village forest-protection committee here to manage the forest? The forest is still astoundingly virgin!” 

There was a brief silence, and then a loud burst of laughter. Before I could react, Malari, Dodi’s wife, quipped: “How do you manage a forest!? The forest has been standing for ages, just as we have been here for ages! The forest is of course much older than us.” 

Dodi cleared his throat, looked at me like a wise hermit, and added: “When our forefathers came here, ages ago, this forest must have welcomed them. Mind you, a forest does not welcome everyone. Now, after ages, we have become one with the forest. We are there because the forest is there. The forest manages us. Who are we to manage the forest? Who can manage a forest? Who can manage Dharti Ma (Mother Earth)?” 

The Niyamgiri mountain in southwest Orissa is not only an irreplaceable source of livelihood, it is also sacred to the Dongria Kondhs

About two years later, in November 2009, when I embarked on a month-long biking expedition into the forests of Orissa to do the field study to support my research on community forest management (CFM) under the Infochange Media Fellowship 2009, I did not forget to carry with me, along with my rucksack, the words and wisdom of Malari, Dodi, and their tribe.  

Managing forests  

It was not without reason that I had asked Dodi the ‘absurd’ question. I had spent the first 10 years of my life in a tiny, idyllic village called Jogisarda in Bolangir district in western Orissa before we moved to an urban life elsewhere. I still remember how we were ordered to return home from playing well before it was dark, or we would find the front door of the house shut. The reason: leopards, bear, and hyenas roamed the Ramai Dongar forests that were barely a kilometre from the house. There were in fact regular stories of cattle being killed and eaten by wild animals.  

Many years later, in 2005, I got a chance to revisit my childhood memories, but to my utter surprise and pain, the Ramai Dongar had all but disappeared. I was unable to locate a single tree let alone the leopards, bear and hyenas I used to fear.  

When I asked an old man there, he told me: “People in Cherupali (in the same district) are wiser; they formed a village forest- protection committee (FPC) some decades ago. Their forest not only exists, it has grown in size. And ours has vanished. And we are rendered helpless.”  

But Niyamgiri and Ramai Dongar are two separate worlds. Till November 2007, there was no ‘road’ tearing through the Niyamgiri forests. Modernity, with all its intriguing logic of ‘opportunity cost’ -- that first comes with a road -- had not invaded Niyamgiri then. Ramai Dongar on the other hand had been the target of ‘investment’ since I was a child, when I used to see truck-loads of timber passing through Jogisarda. So how could the forest possibly have survived and managed the natives who sought to live off it? The forest needed to be managed, which no one had done. So it had disappeared. The old man had not only described a practice they did not know they had to observe, his words were also testimony to how dependent traditional communities are on the forests.  

Even today, more than 300 million people in India depend directly or indirectly on forests to meet their everyday as well as annual needs. It is estimated that out of the 260 million people who live below the poverty line in India, over 100 million are partially or wholly dependent on forest resources for their livelihood. Most of them are adivasis.  

And so I started my research with a premise drawn from personal experience -- that the best forests are those that are as yet untouched by modernity; those that have been left in their primitive form, like the Niyamgiri mountains. Of course, such forests are now few and far between.  

The incredibly vast expanse of India’s forests that not only sustained millions of life forms, including humans, but also a rich socio-cultural ethos, caught the greedy eye of the ‘market’ 150 years ago when the British saw a goldmine in its green spread. The symbiotic relationship between forests and man received the first blow in 1855 when Lord Dalhousie issued the first of the colonial diktats -- the Charter of Indian Forests -- to take control of India’s forests and ‘manage’ them ‘scientifically’. Thus began the ‘freedom struggle’ of the forest-dwellers and forest-dependent people, which continues to this day.  

How forests turned into a commodity  

Anthropologist Narendra Singh, who lives mostly among the adivasis of the Bastar region in Chhattisgarh, distinguishes ‘forests’ from ‘wilds’. He says: “Around the time when the idea of profit was being concretised came the idea of the forest as a money-churning industry. In order to maximise profit, it needed to be managed by the profiteers, which means that they needed to take complete control of it. So laws were formulated; statutes were laid down; boundaries were drawn; restrictions were imposed. On the other hand, those upon whom restrictions were imposed revered the forests as the ‘wilds’, which have no boundaries, no limits, no laws, no statutes. They respected the ‘mystery’ that the wilds were, which they never tried to unravel because they never sought to take control of and manage them. They were in complete harmony with mighty, mysterious Nature, and were happy. But, for modernity to make profit unconquered Nature had to be explored and controlled. So the ‘wilds’ were ruthlessly turned into what they now call ‘forests’, with all the boundaries and maps and statistics of annual revenue they now generate and display in public.” 

The mystery of the wilds was too intriguing for the British

Thus the forest-dwellers (mostly adivasis) became ‘intruders’ in their own homeland overnight. Their livelihood practices such as hunting-gathering and shifting cultivation were termed ‘unscientific’, a ‘social evil’. They were, in many instances, forced to take up the plough, or become bonded labour. Or they were driven out of the forests to face an uncertain future. How it amounted to ‘cultural genocide’ is evident in an account by anthropologist Verrier Elwin who, for many years, researched the Baiga in central India. He states: “The Baiga were reluctant to take to the plough as it was akin to tearing the breasts of your Mother, the Earth,” (Elwin 1939).  

It comes as no surprise therefore that many violent battles in history have been waged in India’s adivasi heartland: Birsa Munda, Rendo Majhi, the adivasi uprising in Chhotanagpur, etc. It is also unsurprising that narratives of these spontaneous adivasi revolts find little space in the mainstream discourse on Indian history.  

The repressive mandates bestowed on the forest department effectively criminalised rural communities for their livelihood dependence on forest resources. Verrier Elwin quoted a forest officer as saying: “Our laws are of such a kind that every villager breaks one forest law every day of his life.” While appropriation of forests and common land by the state was backed by punitive measures designed to deter transgressions, most of rural India had little choice but to become ‘criminals’ in the course of their daily existence. For resisting the takeover of their livelihood bases, tribes were even branded ‘born criminals’ by the British government and forced on the run. Post-Independence, they are still on the run, tagged as ‘de-notified tribes of India’.  

It is not only the state that alienated the natives; timber and land mafias and the corporate sector also joined in once the forests were open for indiscriminate plundering. A document of the Regional Centre for Development Cooperation (RCDC), an NGO based in Bhubaneswar, recounts: “Lured by the enormous and ready source of money, plunderers of all hues have systematically destroyed the forests. Most unfortunately, the state itself was the biggest of them all. Having realised the huge commercial possibilities of the forests, it has constantly sought to establish control over all manners of forests. Inevitably, this has led to a confrontation with the forest-dwelling communities who have been alienated in the process” (RCDC 2002). 

The Charter of Indian Forests, 1855, issued by Lord Dalhousie declared all sal trees -- one of the most sought-after trees because of the strength of its wood -- state property, leading to its trade. The British appointed Dietrich Brandis, a German botanist, Inspector General of Forests in India in 1856, to initiate ‘scientific management of forests’. The Imperial Forest Department was instituted in 1864, followed by promulgation of the Indian Forest Act 1865 which empowered the government to declare any land covered with trees as forest, and establish control over it.This was followed by the Indian Forest Act 1878 which divided forests into reserved, protected, and village forests and prohibited entry of traditional users into large parts of the forest.  

The Voelcker Resolution of 1894 further strengthened state control over forests. Then there was the landmark Indian Forest Act of 1927 that carried provisions similar to those of the 1878 Act; it remains in force even today, albeit with amendments. The Government of India Act 1935 empowered provinces to make their own laws to manage forests. The provinces, however, used the Indian Forest Act of 1927 as a framework to formulate laws that allowed them to exploit the forests to maximise revenues (RCDC 2002). 

As the process of colonialism advanced to serve the needs of the Empire, natural resources began to flow out of the subcontinent and traditional communities were increasingly alienated from their livelihood bases. Perhaps the most notable resource-intensive undertaking by the Raj was the use of timber in the construction of the Indian railway system. In the 50 years between 1860 and 1910, the length of India’s railway tracks increased from 1,349 km to 51,658 km. For every mile of track laid, 860 sleepers were required, of an expected lifespan of 12-14 years. In the 1870s, it was calculated that every year 1 million sleepers were needed. Indian trees, particularly sal, deodar, and teak were used because of their strength (Lawbuary 1999). 

The railways were detrimental to forests not only in their construction but because the railway network helped transport the country’s plundered resources to the ports. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the first railway lines were laid in India in 1853 and the first colonial diktat relating to India’s forests came out in 1855 -- both during Lord Dalhousie’s tenure.  

The impact of the railways on traditional forest economies is evident in Kalahandi-Koraput in southwest Orissa, where the first railway lines were laid in 1896. The region is endowed with rich natural resources -- dense primary forests, abundant water sources and an advanced agricultural history. A number of aboriginal tribes resided here, and there were little signs of deprivation among them. Then, in 1898, the region was gripped by an unprecedented famine. District gazetteers recount a surreal story of how the lone train running on that route transported thousands of tonnes of foodgrain and timber out of the region and, on its way back, brought in relief material for people dispossessed of their natural economic security systems!  

Railway line cutting through the forests of Kalahandi

The total area of forests appropriated by the colonial state in 1878 was 3,625,996 (over 3.6 million) hectares; by 1900, 21,937,272 (nearly 22 million) hectares of forest had been destroyed (Stebbing 1922). Both during the First World War and the Second World War, India’s forests faced the maximum onslaught to feed wartime demands. Table 1 describes the picture during World War II. 

Table 1: Forest area sanctioned during World War II 

Source: Indian Forest Statistics, 1939-40 to 1944-45. Delhi, 1949 

These statistics however do not spell out the enormity of the dispossession of adivasis and other forest-dependent communities whose ancient socio-cultural milieu and traditional economic bases were suddenly devastated. It led to bloody wars in many regions. In Bihar’s Singhbum district, for example, demarcation of a reserve forest by the Imperial Forest Department in the late-19th century dispossessed the Ho tribe from their villages and natural surroundings. The act was noted by the settlement officer of the day as “one great encroachment” that created conflict between the Ho and the department. This escalated into a ‘tree war’, one that still erupts periodically (Corbridge and Jewitt 1997).  

A National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers (NFFPFW) document reads: “Bitter and bloody struggles were waged from one end of the country to the other for control of forests and forest rights. Some of these struggles -- like the Munda uprising in Chhotanagpur and the movement by hill people in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab -- were so intense that the British were forced to enact special legislations to safeguard peoples’ rights in those areas. In many other areas, however, the rule of the law -- meaning the forest department’s zamindari (landlordism) -- became increasingly stronger.” 

It was not always physical confrontations over traditional livelihood sources, however. The process of colonisation -- which included, among other things, the infamous western approach of ‘civilising the savages’ (this is now being practised by the mainstream Indian elites on adivasis to make way for industries that will only cater to the former) -- also played a significant role in alienating forest-dwellers from their natural homes and destroying their cultural ethos that was essentially built on the laws of nature. The British also empowered local zamindars (landlords) to tax and control indigenous communities, and encouraged them to clear forests for cultivation to further empower an ever-growing feudal class.  

Another intriguing feature of 19th-century India was the mass intrusion of non-adivasis into the adivasi heartland, especially in central India. Large tracts of forests were cleared between the 1840s and the 1940s to create farmland for non-adivasis. Though the adivasis fought violent battles with these intruders too, in most cases they were pushed deeper into the forests. Appropriation of adivasi lands and forests by non-adivasis still takes place.  

The legacy continues 

The sovereign Indian state was born in 1947. But this newborn did not cry at birth; it came smiling, wrapped in colonial clothes. Drunk with the often-debated ideals of his ‘nation-building’ programme, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, did not mind ‘sacrificing’ the country’s natural resources (especially forests) and its indigenous people to make way for industry and big dams. It was, in his words, in the “national interest”. As though rural and forest populations did not matter in the rush towards ‘development’, the National Forest Policy of 1952 -- among other policies -- clearly deems them sacrificial lambs. For example, it read:

“Village communities in the neighbourhood of a forest will naturally make greater use of its products for the satisfaction of their domestic and agricultural needs. Such use, however, should in no event be permitted at the cost of national interests. The accident of a village being situated close to a forest does not prejudice the right of the country as a whole to receive the benefits of a national asset… Restrictions should be imposed in the interests not only of the existing generation, but also of posterity.”

Thus, for the newly-independent Indian state a ‘village being situated close to a forest’ was just an ‘accident’!  

Although the 1952 Forest Policy sought to keep one-third of India’s total land area under forest cover, large tracts of primary forest were destroyed to build infrastructures, big dams and industry. As a result, millions of people were forcibly evicted from their homes.  

Soumitra Ghosh of the NFFPFW says: “The forest department never uses the term ‘conversion’ of forests for non-forest purposes; they call it ‘diversion’, just as they do not use the term ‘deforestation’, that is blasphemy for them, they call it ‘degradation’. Now consider this: between 1952 and 1980, a staggering 4.3 million hectares of forest lands have been ‘diverted’ for ‘non-forestry purposes’, according to none other than the MoEF. These activities or developmental projects which catered essentially to privileged urban communities displaced millions of tribal/rural people from their ancestral lands (Planning Commission of India estimates suggest that 21.3 million people were displaced by development projects between 1951 and 1990 alone) and also created social and political tensions.” Thousands of forest-dwellers who were displaced in the late-1940s by the Hirakud dam in Orissa have still not been rehabilitated.  

The price of development: forest-dwellers displaced by the Hirakud dam in the 1940s have still not been rehabilitated

The 1952 Forest Policy also discouraged shifting cultivation and restricted grazing in forest areas. It denounced community rights on the commons and explicitly asserted the monopoly right of the state (Guha 1983).  

Exploitation of forest resources to maximise revenue for the state during this period not only continued but intensified. Then came the draft Forest Conservation Bill in 1980. This Bill was almost a copy of the 1878 Forest Act; 81 of the 84 sections were simply reproduced (Guha 1983). Rightly dubbed ‘a draconian Bill’, it sought to give the government complete control over the forests. It assigned more power to state governments to exercise control over forests and lands. Forest and police officials were empowered to harass anybody found ‘guilty’ of destroying forests. Mercifully, the Bill was not introduced in Parliament owing to stiff resistance by social and environmental activists, forestry experts, and tribal organisations (RCDC 2002).  

The Forest (Conservation) Act came into existence in 1980. It amended the Constitution to transfer forests from the ‘state list’ to the ‘concurrent list’ and made it mandatory for state governments to seek permission from the Centre before de-reserving any part of a reserved forest.  

The National Forest Policy, 1988, was a significant departure from the forest department’s stance of ‘acting landlord’ over India’s forests. In this historical paradigm shift, for the first time the rights of local communities were given precedence over the exploitation of forests for commercial purposes. Forests were finally looked at as ‘local resources’, and participation of local communities was emphasised in their management. The same year, an amendment was made to the existing policy forbidding state governments from diverting forests for non-forest activities without approval from the central government. These developments led to the drafting of the 1990 resolution on joint forest management (JFM) by the Government of India.  

Unfortunately, the hope generated by the 1988 National Forest Policy turned out to be misplaced. The forest department continued to lord it over the forests, and all legal and structural formulations laid out in the new policy remained on paper only, leading to more conflict between forest-dependent communities and the department. A song of the Murias in Bastar explains in just two lines what the forest department actually means to the millions of forest-dwellers in India:

“Heaven is a forest of miles and miles of mohua trees;
And hell is a forest of miles and miles of mohua trees, with a forest guard in it!” 

Although the 1988 policy emphasised one-third of India’s land area to be kept under forest cover (first envisioned in the 1952 policy), India’s forest cover today is a meagre 23.84% of its total land area (including the 2.82% with only tree cover), according to the MoEF in its India State of Forest Report 2009. According to the State of Forests Report 2003, India continued losing forest cover. 2003 estimates record a net loss of nearly 3 million hectares of ‘dense forests’, pointing to serious and continued destruction of forests with a canopy density of 40% and above. However, the 2009 report states that between 1997 and 2007, forest cover in India grew by 3.13 million hectares. With such immense pressure on forests, especially post-reforms, where did this regeneration take place, and how?

India’s economic reforms of 1991 placed a further burden on its forests, to make way for rapid industrialisation. Today, forest communities have been pushed to the wall and can only try and ‘resist’ the state’s forced acquisition of their forests, lands, resources, and livelihoods. 

Forest people continue to resist the forceful takeover of their homes

Emergence of a ‘forest class’ 

There is no ambiguity about the fact that the assertion of state monopoly rights and the exclusion of forest communities have marked the organising principles of forest administration since its inception in 1864. An important justification of the state-property rights regime invokes the ‘tragedy of the commons’ argument. This notion undermines the ability of forest-dependent communities to preserve natural resource and ecosystems, and puts the state in perpetual conflict with them (Hazra 2002). 

After the concept of managing forests ‘scientifically’, primarily to generate revenue, was imposed, forest-dependent communities -- for whom forests are not just a permanent source of livelihood but, more importantly, a physical and spiritual space in which their worldview takes shape, in sync with the evolution of the planet and the cosmos -- suddenly found themselves severed from their roots. The very foundation of their socio-cultural milieu -- in which their economic imperatives were embedded -- was shattered. For decades they could not come to terms with the alien space they were thrown into, although some managed to survive the cultural genocide and have resisted the onslaught. Slowly, this resistance took a new and decisive shape: community forest management.  

Despite the repressive diktats of the self-proclaimed ‘lord of the forests’, communities in several parts of India started realising, by the beginning of the 20th century, that unless they take on the mantle of managing the village commons -- especially village forests -- in the changed scenario, they would perish. While the intention of the forest department was to exploit resources for profit, for these communities forest management was not only a way of ‘protecting’ existing forests but also ‘regenerating’ forests lost at the hands of the forest department and protecting them to meet their basic needs. And so a quiet revolution began in rural India, a revolution which, though violent at times and in places, gained momentum in the 1960s and has spread across the length and breadth of the country, proving yet again what ‘self-governance’ and the ‘democratic spirit’ truly mean in theory as well as in praxis.  

In the process, a new ‘forest class’ has evolved. I call it ‘forest class’ -- taking the cue and digressing slightly from the remarkable villagers of Kesarpur in Nayagarh district of Orissa who, against all odds, have regenerated large tracts of forests with dense canopy through community efforts, and who proudly call themselves the ‘forest caste’ -- because of the amazing ‘inclusiveness’ of these village-level social formations that cannot, in most cases if not all, be distinguished by any particular tribe, caste, religion, or economic group. And the binding thread running through this socio-cultural movement is, essentially, the forest.  

The success of this self-driven initiative, the sense of collective ownership and display of democratic functioning, prodded the forest department into coming up with a similar people-driven programme in 1990 -- the joint forest management (JFM) programme. But most grassroots forest-protection groups I met during my research in Orissa called the move “a desperate attempt by the forest department to (1) sabotage people’s efforts; (2) appropriate forests regenerated/expanded/protected and now ‘owned’ by the people; and (3) save face against the ignominy of having failed to protect the country’s forests for the past 150 years”.   

Community forest management is an impeccable symbol of democratic, egalitarian and sustainable socio-economic and cultural units exhibiting the advanced structures and sustainable models on which traditional Indian economies are built. It’s something that India -- the world’s largest democracy -- should be protecting and making space for. Unfortunately, the state’s approach towards CFM reeks of the same intentions as those of the first colonial diktat of 1855: ensuring the state’s complete control over forests in order to treat them as commodities to be bartered for short-term financial gain.  

Still, CFM initiatives in India are thriving and offering hope for the country’s forests as well as millions of forest-dependent people. The core of these village-based forest-protection groups falls in the central tribal belt stretching from the northeast states through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. Forest-protection groups in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Gujarat have been growing in number, with Orissa being the torchbearer state.  

References 

Corbridge S and Jewitt S, 1997. ‘From forest struggles to forest citizens? Joint Forest Management in the unquiet woods of India’s Jharkhand’. Environment and Planning A Vol 29, 2,145–2,164 

Elwin V, 1939. ‘Civilising the Savage’. Social Ecology, pp 249–274, edited by Guha R, 1998. New Delhi: Oxford University Press 

Guha M, 1983. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. New Delhi: Oxford University Press 

Hazra A K, 2002. ‘History of conflict over forests in India: A market-based resolution’. Working paper series. Julian L Simon Centre of Policy Research. New Delhi: Liberty Institute 

Lawbuary J, 1999. Reclaiming the Forests? -- People's Participation in Forest Management, East India. King’s College: London  

RCDC, 2002. ‘Evolution of Legal Framework: Alienation of Forest-dwellers’. Community Forestry, 1: 1 and 2, January 2002 

Stebbing E P, 1922. The Forests of India, Vol 1. John Lane: London 

(Subrat Kumar Sahu is an independent writer and filmmaker based in New Delhi. He was formerly with TerraGreen, a magazine on the environment and sustainable development. He was awarded the Infochange Media Fellowship 2009 to research the history of community forest management in his native Orissa)  

Infochange News & Features, March 2010

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