Community Forest Management
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community forest management A Casebook from India Joe Human and Manoj Pattanaik Oxfam facing page: Tree nursery, Kesharpur village First published by Oxfam GB in 2000 ©0xfamGB2ooo ISBN0855984392 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. Reproduction, copy, transmission, or translation of any part of this publication maybe made only under the following conditions: • Withtheprior written permission of the publisher; or • With a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd., 90 Tottenham Court Road, LondonWiP9HE,UK,orfrom another national licensing agency; or • For quotation in a review of the work; or • Under the terms set out below. This publication is copyright, but may be reproduced by any method without fee for teaching purposes, but not for resale. Formal permission is required for all such uses, but normally will be granted immediately. 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Oxfam GB is a registered charity, no. 202 918, and is a member of Oxfam International. Front cover photograph: RajnikantYadav/Oxfam This book converted to digital file in 2010 Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction i • i The years of struggle 3 • 2 The wider picture 22 • 3 India's forest peoples 38 • 4 The people fight back 58 • 5 BOJBP: from birth to maturity 73 • 6 Problems and challenges 98 • 7 The elements of success 127 • 8 Lessons learned 139 Appendix 1: Thengapalli: a resource for primary schools 145 Appendix 2: BOJBP publications 154 Appendix 3: Update on BOJBP and the Mahasangha 156 Notes 160 Further reading 169 Index 171 Acknowledgements The origins of this book go back to 1991, when I first visited Bruksha O'Jeevar Bandhu Parishad ('BOJBP' - Friends of Trees and Living Beings) with Oxfam colleagues from Bhubaneswar. Astonished by the achievements of the move- ment, which were so clear for all to see in the form of hills re-dothed in forest, I wrote in their visitors' book: November 18th has been an inspiring day. Thank you for sharing it with me. In turn I will share it with Oxfam friends and supporters in Britain. In that way I will try to reach many people with the message 'Trees are our life' - your message, which is the message for us all. Over the years since that day I have kept my promise and have told the story literally hundreds of times to a very wide variety of people, and am still telling it, to Oxfam volunteers and staff, primary-school children, sixth formers, school teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, environmental activists, women's groups, church organisations, and foresters. Thousands have heard it. When it was proposed that I should write the story, I felt the need to work with someone closer to the forests of Orissa than I was. After much discussion, Manoj Pattanaik, from the Bhubaneswar-based Regional Centre for Development Co-operation, was asked to work with me on the project, and he agreed. This book is the outcome, therefore, of collaboration between us, with Manoj working in India and myself in Oxford, in touch all the time by e-mail. (Without it the project would have been much more complicated and a good deal slower.) While technology has eased the process of writing, people have been essential to it. Indeed the book would have been impossible without the help of an enormous number of individuals. We want particularly to acknowledge our debt to Joginath Sahoo, Udayanath Katei (Bapa), and Professor Narayan Hazari, who have played such crucial roles in the formation and development Community forest management of BOJBP, and who generously gave us of their time. But we interviewed numerous others, whose views helped to shape and give substance to the book and without whom it simply could not have been written in the way we wanted to write it. They are Anand Charan Acharya, Bhagaban Acharya, Ramesh Kumar Barad, Kanaka Barik, Biswanath Basantia, Kalandi Charan Behera, Gadadhara Bhatta, Mrs. Buli, Puna Dei, Bhobani Dora, S. Madhusudan Dora, Dhoba Gadu, Ms. Geeta, Manoj Hazary, Anil Kumar Jena, Sunderi Jena, Susant Jena, Uttama Jena, Purna Chandra Khandual, Digambar Mahapatra, Pitabasa Mahapatra, Kumudini Maharana, Rumi Maharana, Dambarudhara Majhi, Gokula Maharana, Sudarshan Malla, Ms. Mamata, Subas Chandra Mishra, Ajay Mohanty, Bankanidhi Mohanty, Govind Mohanty, Balabadhra Mohapatra, Binodini Mohapatra, Mamata Mohapatra, Purna Chandra Mohapatra, Subasini Mohapatra, Alaka Nanda, Kanchanabala Nayak, Hazari Parida, Baikuntha Pattanaik, Gopal Pattanaik, Kulamani Pattanaik, Pradip Pattanaik, Purna Chandra Pattanaik, Balaram Pradhan, Banchhanidhi Pradhan, Bhagaban Pradhan, Bula Pradhan, Jaladhara Pradhan, Kaushalya Pradhan, Malati Pradhan, Neema Pradhan, Kalpana Senapati, Bansidhar Sahoo, Bisnuprasad Sahoo, Kailash Sahoo, Lalita Sahoo, Nrusingha Sahoo, Purna Chandra Sahoo, Taramani Sahoo, Ms. Satyabhama, Bhagaban Subudhi, Anupama Swain, Aparna Swain, Pratima Swain, Prativa Swain, Santilata Swain, Shashi Swain, and Suresh Chandra Swain. We are especially grateful to Priya Nilimani, who facilitated many of our interviews and who was helpful in numerous other ways, clarifying issues for us and giving many useful insights. Without him our work would have been very much more difficult. Bhikhyakari Hazary and Prahallad Sathua, the present Secretary of BOJBP, were also very helpful, and we are most grateful to them, as we are to Manoj Rathy and Niranjan, who gave us much support during our visits. At the Mahasangha, four people were generous with their time, and with their insights into the development of the Mahasangha itself and BOJBP. They are Barna Baibhav Panda ('Bubu'), Lakhmidara Balia, Bhagaban Dash, and Rabi Parida. We also acknowledge the help given to us by members of three sister organisations, Sabuja Jeevan, Ratnamala Jungle Surakhya Committee, and Sulia Paribesa Parishad. In addition to all these there were others, too numerous to mention, who made us very welcome and who hosted us on our visits. We also want to thank Sriramappa, Oxfam's former Regional Representative, and Sarthak Pal, Project Officer in Bhubaneswar, Professor A. B. Mishra of Sambalpur University, and Joginath Sahoo for reading the VI Acknowledgements draft and making many useful comments. I would like to add Sabita Banerji and Abhijit Bhattacharjee in Oxfam House in Oxford, and John Gwynn in Oxfam's Delhi office, who have been personally very supportive to me. I would like to thank Dylan Theodore, who saw the power and universal relevance of the story of Friends of Trees and Living Beings, and had the vision to translate it into a brilliant resource - Thengapalli - for teachers and children in Britain. I would also like to thank Chris Kilby of the Cedars School, Veronica Lucas and children of Thornhill Junior School, and Martine Cox and children at King's Copse Primary School, all in Hampshire, who, among so many, have taken Thengapalli into their hearts and into ways of thinking about the environment, and who shared with me their responses to it. The photographs in the book have come from Oxfam's photo-library and from the Thengapalli pack. We thank Hampshire County Council for permission to use those photos from the pack that are not in our library. Almost all are from the studio of Rajendra Shaw, of the Centre of Development Communications in Hyderabad. One, the cover photo, is by Rajnikant Yadav, another Oxfam-commissioned photographer. We are grateful to Kate Theodore for permission to use the map of Keshapur which she drew for the Thengapalli pack. We thank Oxford University Press in Delhi for permission to use the map, Figure 5 (Chapter 3), which is taken from Village Voices, Forest Choices, edited by Mark Poffenberger and Betsy McGean. We thank Ashish Publishing House, Delhi, for permission to quote extensively from Environmental Management in India, Volume II, edited by P.K. Saparo. I am grateful to Catherine Robinson, my editor at Oxfam Publishing, for her meticulous attention to detail and consistent support. Finally I would like to thank, Jill, my wife, without whom this project would never have been completed. Whatever help and support we have received from all those named and unnamed, the end product is our responsibility alone, and any errors of omis- sion and commission, interpretation and inference lie entirely with us. Joe Human Oxford July 2000 Vll Introduction This is the story of a remarkable organisation: Friends of Trees and Living Beings (Bruksha O' Jeevar Bandhu Parishad - BOJBP).