Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
local customary rights to exploit natural resources - a blind spot that
persisted for more than a century.
Administrators did, however, distinguish between rights that were not
permitted, and privileges that were granted as concessions to graze and
collect firewood. Gadgil and Guha indicate that such privileges were 'granted
by the policy of the government for the convenience of the people' . 29 In practice, there
were many interpretations, from those who argued the state should annex
and take complete control of all forests, to administrators who argued that
where customary use existed, it should also be granted legal rights.
According to Gadgil and Guha, the first inspector general, Dietrich
Brandes, was a pragmatist who drew comparison between common rights
to the New Forest in England and indigenous management of forests in
India. He advocated the restricted take-over of forests by the state, and
wrote appreciatively of common regulation of forests and the extended
network of sacred forest groves.
However, Brandes lost out, and the subsequent 1878 Indian Forest Act
set the scene for another century by granting forests and punitive sanctions
to the forest department. Between 1878 and 1900, the area of designated
state forests grew from 36,000 to 200,000 square kilometres, of which
40 per cent comprised protected forests. By independence, the total had
grown to 250,000 square kilometres. Meanwhile, the forest department
evolved into a revenue-raising department, rather than a resource manager,
and its success was judged on income rather than the stock of biodiversity
maintained. Predictably, this marginalized those who depended upon
wild resources, such as hunter-gatherers, shifting agriculturalists and
settled farmers and artisans who relied upon forest products for house
construction, basket-making, musical instruments, furniture, weaving,
tanning and dyeing. 30
An inevitable result of such exclusions and denials of rights is that local
people are forced to struggle for their land. Over the last two decades of
the 20th century, the expansion of national parks and protected areas
which permitted no, or very limited, use of local resources continued at
a rate of 600,000 hectares per year, resulting in the forcible displacement
of many thousands of people. This has provoked many open protests,
rallies and acts of sabotage against national parks and protected areas
themselves. In the early 1980s, more than 100 clashes were reported from
national parks and sanctuaries in India. Later, villagers set fire to large areas
of the Kanha and Nagarhole National Parks during the early 1990s, when
denied access to the park for forest products. In remote areas, insurgents
have taken advantage of local resentment to take over a tiger reserve in
Assam and drive out forest guards, and to invade a tiger and buffalo reserve
in Madya Pradesh, where 52 villages of tribals had been evicted. 31
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