Gori River Basin Substate BSAP
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A BIODIVERSITY LOG AND STRATEGY INPUT DOCUMENT FOR THE GORI RIVER BASIN WESTERN HIMALAYA ECOREGION DISTRICT PITHORAGARH, UTTARANCHAL A SUB-STATE PROCESS UNDER THE NATIONAL BIODIVERSITY STRATEGY AND ACTION PLAN INDIA BY FOUNDATION FOR ECOLOGICAL SECURITY MUNSIARI, DISTRICT PITHORAGARH, UTTARANCHAL 2003 SUBMITTED TO THE MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT AND FORESTS GOVERNMENT OF INDIA NEW DELHI CONTENTS FOREWORD ............................................................................................................ 4 The authoring institution. ........................................................................................................... 4 The scope. .................................................................................................................................. 5 A DESCRIPTION OF THE AREA ............................................................................... 9 The landscape............................................................................................................................. 9 The People ............................................................................................................................... 10 THE BIODIVERSITY OF THE GORI RIVER BASIN. ................................................ 15 A brief description of the biodiversity values. ......................................................................... 15 Habitat and community representation in flora. .......................................................................... 15 Species richness and life-form diversity. ...................................................................................... 16 Biological integrity and sensitive elements. ................................................................................. 17 Orchid Diversity in Gori Valley ................................................................................................... 18 THE AGRICULTURE............................................................................................... 19 Patterns and diversity. .............................................................................................................. 19 Cropping Systems ......................................................................................................................... 19 Patterns of land distribution ........................................................................................................ 21 Crop Rotation ............................................................................................................................... 21 Crop Diversity .............................................................................................................................. 22 Changing trends and patterns in agriculture: .............................................................................. 23 Herb cultivation............................................................................................................................ 24 Sheep and goats ............................................................................................................................ 25 Cows and buffaloes ...................................................................................................................... 27 Yaks (Bos grunniens) : ................................................................................................................. 28 Horses and mules ......................................................................................................................... 29 Bees. ............................................................................................................................................. 29 THE TRADE IN WILD ANIMAL AND PLANT PARTS. ............................................... 31 Trade in wild animal parts. ...................................................................................................... 31 Present trends in hunting wild animals. ................................................................................... 32 The trade in wild plants............................................................................................................ 37 THE RIVER. ............................................................................................................ 1 The river ecology. ...................................................................................................................... 2 Proposed hydro-electric projects on the Gori river. ................................................................... 3 MINING .................................................................................................................. 5 Sand mining ............................................................................................................................... 5 Talc-mining ................................................................................................................................ 5 Precious and other metals .......................................................................................................... 6 FOREST AND LAND RELATED POLICIES IN THE REGION ....................................... 7 Pre-Independence Period ........................................................................................................... 7 Post-Independence Period .......................................................................................................... 9 At the National level:...................................................................................................................... 9 Old Reserves and Class II Forests ........................................................................................... 10 Rights in the Old Reserves: .......................................................................................................... 11 Class I Reserved Forests .......................................................................................................... 11 Civil Forests ............................................................................................................................. 12 Van Panchayats ........................................................................................................................ 13 2 STATE PROTECTED AREAS ................................................................................... 14 Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve ............................................................................................... 14 Askot Musk deer Sanctuary ..................................................................................................... 19 THE COMMONS IN THE GORI RIVER-BASIN. ....................................................... 22 Van Panchayats ........................................................................................................................ 22 STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS. ................................ 34 3 FOREWORD The authoring institution. The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), which has projects in seven states of India, has been working in the Gori river valley, in the north of Pithoragarh district in Uttaranchal, now for over ten years. Its work involves creating, strengthening and assisting village institutions, (in this case Village Forest Councils or Van Panchayats), to revegetate and revitalize their natural resource commons, and in the local and democratic governance of these commons. Around this core, is a range of activities on the interconnected dimensions of building and conserving biological diversity, both of wild as well as „minion‟ species, as well as necessarily addressing the subsistence livelihoods of local communities that are based on such a diversity of life. The Project Team of the FES at Munsiari has, over the past decade, been interacting with almost every village in the Gori river basin. The basin has 171 inhabited villages, and direct physical work through the project is underway in about 88 of them. While work has now been initiated in the neighboring Darma and Byans valleys, it was decided to undertake the exercise only for the Gori valley where the team was more familiar with the communities and the issues, and which by itself was a substantial task. The area, as we will see in this description, is unusually rich in biological diversity. However, despite its remote location and difficult access, it is deeply penetrated by large and distant markets. A severe degradation is underway in the area, but one that you cannot easily „see‟, and this is described later. We are also witness to the progressive falling apart of the more cohesive and self-reliant existence of local communities, and the increasingly desperate recourse to extracting and selling whatever they can from their landscapes. The project attempts to understand, sometimes with village communities and sometimes from them, more dimensions of the diversity of life around them, and how they ascribe values to them. To collectively discover and enunciate the links between various dimensions of biodiversity on the one hand, and on the other, the economic dimensions of long-term food security, diverse livelihoods options, and the ability to cope with risk and uncertainty in a harsh environment. The project also attempts to understand how various elements are related to and are interdependent on other elements around it, to gain cues on what can and must be done to try and conserve it. Certain aspects are all too apparent, though the causes,