Up for scrutiny

The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests has agreed to allow independent agencies to evaluate how well it is managing forests.

Wealth of forests withheld

Some 40 years ago an experiment began in Arabari forest range of West Bengal that caught the fancy of the nation. The forest authorities roped in the people living in the area in regenerating degraded forests. In return they offered them a share in forest resources and revenue. It worked. Two decades later the Centre adopted the Arabari model to start the Joint Forest Management programme. The response was such that today it involves 25 million people.

They also serve

  Class of 2006, Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy, Dehradun

State inaction

Savvy Soumya Misra Walking in a single file, through wooded paths, they all headed towards the panchayat office in Premnagar block of Chhattisgarh's Sarguja district. They came in large numbers--men and women, old and young. They came from villages far and near. They were mostly Gond tribals. And they all had one question on their mind What was this Forest Rights Act they had been hearing so much about since January this year?

Saga of two villages

Sukhomajri, a village in Haryana's Panchkula district, became a model of self-reliant development in the 1980s. Its journey from the depths of poverty to a level of prosperity that made it the first Indian village to pay income tax has been a source of inspiration the world over. What lay behind this incredible story was its success in managing its ecological wealth by creating a powerful and united village institution the Hill Resource Management Society (hrms).

Too cut & dried

"States like Madhya Pradesh (mp) must be compensated at least in proportion to the forest cover that it has protected, which is far more than the national average", said Digvijay Singh, ex-chief minister, at a National Development Council meeting in 2002.

Have India's tribal leaders failed their people?

India has the largest tribal population in the world. Tribals number 8.6 per cent of its total population. They are also among the country's most marginalised. Why has India's political democracy not given its tribals their due? What is in India's political system that prevents the tribal voice from being heard? Or have tribal representatives in the high echelons of India's politicaldom failed their constituencies? What exactly is wrong?

The woods are lovely

COLONIAL forest administration, which didn't give a damn about the fecund land it was so easily reducing to cinders and stumps, lasted almost a century. The sad thing is that even after Independence, the imperial order of green decimation refused to come unstuck and is now almost pathologically entrenched in the minds of a bureaucracy paralysed by 40 years of self-misrule and a complete lack of a love 0' the land.

The spirit of the sanctuary

FIVE YEARS ago, the social forestry department in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra cleared several trees from a forest near Nandivse village to plant acacia trees. It did not know that the 4-ha patch was a sacred grove surrounding the temple of a powerful local deity, Kal Bhairon. The villagers, too, joined in because they were paid for the felling and planting.

Reserved for exploitation?

After refusing a World Heritage Site tag by UNESCO for its pristine Western Ghats early this year, the Karnataka government has recently shelved a proposal to upgrade the conservation status of 12 reserve forests in the mountain range.