JETHU RAM looks jaded and tired. But at the ripe old age of
87, he is definitely not a man out of sync with the times. In
fact he is far ahead of the times.Twenty-five years ago when
his village Sukhomajri, in Haryana's Punchkula district,
had neither water nor trees he joined up with environmentalist P R Mishra and spread the message of regeneration and
-conservation. Many years later, after Sukhomajri became a
glowing example of how community forest management
could make a village self-sufficient, his wrinkled face reflects a
sense of pride.
The nearly 1,500 gujjar villagers of Sukhomajri have long
since realised the truth in Jethu Ram's and Mishra's mantra.
From the late 1970's when Mishra convinced the villagers after
much initial hostility and suspicion about the benefits of soil
conservation and efficient use of forest wealth, the villagers
have participated in the Chakriya Vikas Pranali, a method of
sustainable development. Two decades of this programme had
seen Sukhomajri become a self-sustaining village. There was
enough grass for fodder after the villagers prevented their cattle from overgrazing, there was sufficient mungri or its full
grown version bhabber to harvest and sell as raw iiiaterial for
pulp, there was enough water after four earthen dams were
built to collect monsoon water. Sukhomajri had set a rare
example of conservation and social planning.
Twenty-five years later that green of hope and prosperity
seems to be turning a jaded brown of despair. The reason:
soon after the village found its own path to prosperity, government departments, lackadaisical and callous till then,
decided to step in. In 1995 in what can be termed a brutal
stroke, the forest department arbitrarily divided the 400hectare hill tract between Sukhomajri and its neighbour village
Dhamala. Residents of Sukhomajri were no longer allowed to
collect fodder from the area demarcated for Dhamala.
This division of land apart from ruining the resource
management programme has also created social tension in
the area.The Dhamala village consists of upper caste Jats who
had influenced the forest department to divide the forest so
that they could grab nearly 80 per cent of the grass which fell
in their part of the forest. The Jats, apart from getting a lion's
share of the forest could also thus stymie the Gujjars who were
the people who actually helped raise the quantity and quality
of bhabber.
Till the forest department intervened in the smooth and
silent revolution in Sukbomajri, forest produce was being
shared by the two villages. With the demarcation the concept
of social fencing (self restraint by villagers in using forest produce) showed signs of breaking down and the two villages
became competitors for fodder instead of being collaborators.
Both the villages used to share grazing and other rights in the
same forest area. Sukhomajri's residents have been protecting
the forest from the beginning though the resulting profit
from auctioning bhabber was shared equally among them. The
division of the forest threatened this arrangement.
Despite such governmental interference the Sukhomajri
experiment can be termed a success because it proved that
with community planning, a bit of restraint and commitment,
the economy of any village can be turned around. Sukhomajri
also showed that from self-destruction to rejuvenation was
only a short hop if only people are drawn into social programmes and given control of the resources. For instance in
Sukhomajri the tree density in the village forest increased from
13 per hectare in 1976 to an amazing 1,272 per hectare in 1992.
Moreover, soil from the hilltracts surrounding these villages
was no longer silting Chandigarh's Sukhna Lake.
By allowing the village community to become owners of
the produce of their own land, a vested interest was created:
the people had a stake in protecting and nurturing their environment. Sukhomajri also taught environmentalists and rural
development mandarins that environmental regeneration has
to start with water conservation and not with trees. Once a
small water harvesting system has been built and an equities
system has been developed to share the water the village community will immediately see the benefits of protecting the
catchment of its water system through controlled grazing and
planting trees and grasses. Once the people start managing the
village ecosystem, basic problems of survival and growth are
solved on its own.
After the HRMS was formed the forest department agreed to
lease the forest land with grass to the villagers who in turn
leased it to the contractor after ensuring good profit. In return
the villagers were duty-bound to protect the grass in the forest
by not resorting to indiscriminate cutting and grazing. The
production of bhabber went up by 200 per cent in four years.
Since 1993, bhabber from the forest land between the two villages has been fetching more than Rs I lakh. In 1994, it fetched
around Rs 2 lakh.
Every year an increase of 7.5 per cent is added to the
lease amount in order to compensate for inflation. This
is where the department actually played dirty and started
taxing the villagers for no rhyme or reason (see table: Unfair
taxes). According to the new arrangement ad;opted in 1997-98,
after the villagers' need of bhabber is taken care of, the
net profit has to be shared between the village society and
the government. The net profit is arrived after deducting
the lease money, income tax (15.3 per cent) and sales tax (8.8per cent) from the gross sale amount.
While 25 per cent of the net profit
goes to the government as revenue,
the rest 75 per cent is again shared
between the village society and the
forest department. One tenth of this
75 per cent share goes to the Kalyan
Kosh (village welfare fund) which is
deposited in a state-level account for
spending on development of villages.
According to forest officials till. now
this money has not been spent as the
modalities of spending it has not been
charted out.
Thirty per cent goes to the
'plough back account' managed
jointly by the divisional forest office
and the president of the village society. This amount will entirely be
spent on forest development. The rest
belongs to the society.
Going by this convoluted calculation the villagers are left with just about 45 per cent of what
they earn. For instance, if the net profit is Rs 120, Rs 30 would
remain with government as revenue. From the balance of
Rs 90, Rs 9 would go to the Kalyan Kosh and Rs 30 to the
plough back fund, leaving only Rs 51 with the village society.
So the villagers have direct control only over Rs 51 (about
45 per cent). The rates imposed by the forest department are
randomly drawn up and do not conform to any known rules.
For regenerated timber like khair (Accacia catechu), the
value of which can be as much as Rs I crore a year on a
sustainable basis, the sharing pattern would be 75 per cent for
the government and a mere 25 per cent for the villagers. And
this unequal division, too, is on net profits, not on gross profits. In other words, the forest department will first deduct its
cost of logging the forest. The forest department is yet to
declare how the timber would be valued and the net sale. The
department is clearly squeezing money out of the villagers and
acting like an extremely rapacious landlord.
Pangi Ram, president of the Sukhomajri HRMS, feels that Unfair taxes
How the bhabber sale money is siphoned off the reasons for the sudden government interest in the village which they had even forgotten to acknowledge is due to the
spiralling price of bhabber after a paper mill was set up in the
area. Paper mills wanted larger quantities of bhabber or wild
grass and started outbidding each other for the precious raw
material to make pulp. In 1994-95, Ballarpur Paper Mill in
PinjIore was offering Rs 1,050 per tonDe of bhabber. The competitor, Panwi paper Mill in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh, started
offering Rs 2,800 per tonne. A contractor who had offered
Rs 50,000 as lease amount for harvesting bhabber in the
Dhamala area of the forest hiked his offer to Rs 1,50,000 for
the next year. Wild grass was undergoing value-addition.
Sukhomajri stood to gain immensely.
But the forest department had other plans. The effort at a
clandestine take-over of the forest land was aimed at getting a
major share of the new money that wild grass now commanded in the market. The HRMS that managed the environment of
the village and provided a forum for villagers to
discuss their problems was told that all its
activities including the holding of elections
would henceforth be monitored by the forestdepartment and the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERi) which was the facilitator of the
joint forest management project in Haryana.
The department refused to recognise Pangi
Ram's election as president of the village
society for over six months on the pretext that
.prior permission was not taken".
The role Of TERI in muddying the waters is
also distressing. TERi prepared a report in 1994
on the cutting of bliabber which suggested that
the practice of Sukhomajri villagers of cutting
mungri (bhabber sprouts) decreased the yield
considerably. "Even one dipping done in July
depresses the final fibre from the November cutting by about
45 per cent. Harvesting of grass, including fodder grass should
be avoided during their active period of growth, that is in
July-August". This report also had the stamp of the forest
department and in 1994 itself the government banned cutting
of mungfi.
It affected the villagers of Sukhomajri the most. Mungri
was crucial for them as due to their small landholdings they do
not raise fodder in their fields during dry months and just
before monsoon they have to depend on mungri. "Since
centuries we have been cutting mungri as it is inevitable," says
Pappu Ram, a Sukhomajri villager. Now as the villagers
disobey the ban, Dhamala villagers are furious citing that they
are loosing huge money due to less yield of bhabber as a result
of cutting mungri.
"The report says that the yield of bhabber would reduce by
45 per cent if mungri is cut. Does not it affect their interest?
Why is it that only Sukhomajri disobeys the ban order while
another village obeys it? Cannot Sukbomajri afford buying
grass for one month also?" says R P Dange, the divisional
forest officer.
Sukhomajri and Dhamala are extremely different villages
which is a major cause of the tension between them. Firstly,
Sukhomajri is inhabited by low-caste Gujjars while Dhamala is
made up of higher caste and more influential Jats. Secondly,
Sukhomajri dwellers are largely animal herders while Dhamala
Dwellers are mostly landowners. The few Gujjar animal
herders of Dhamala are largely landless and have so say in village matters. Being animal herders, it is the people of
Sukhomajri who had to protect the forest. Thirdly, being
animal herders, people of Sukhomajri have a greater interest in
using bhabber as fodder whereas people of Dhamala mainly
have an interest in selling it to paper mills. It is in these
inherent differences that the tensions between Sukhomajri and
Dhamala lie and which are being stoked by outsiders.
Forest officials generally tend to support the TFRi report
findings. S K Dhar who as the chief conservator of forest
stamped the report, says, "I myself had done a study on the
impact of mungri cutting on the ultimate yield of bhabber. It
shows that the yield is reduced by 60 per cent. It is science and
people should adopt it."
Most academics and scientists are however unwilling to
accept this view. R C Barisal, senior scientist at the
Chandigarh-based Central Soil and Water Conservation
Research and Training Institute (CSWRTI) and who is closely associated with
Sukhomajri since 1975, says. "It does not affect the yield and above all an experiment in a few square metres of land is not representative. My studies show that its impact is not as threatening as has been hyped," he says.
According to Barisal, as bhabber grows very fast during rain, any impact of mungri cutting could be nullified. "On this basis, while the cutting is
traditional and also necessary, the report should not have been
given official stamp which has caused conflict between the two
villages," he adds. Forest officials based in Pinjore refused to
comment on it saying that the state forest department has
agreed to the findings and has banned mungri cutting.
Now that Sukhomajri has ecological wealth, everybody is out
to loot the villagers - from the forest department to the
neighbouring villagers. Suddenly the price of bhabber which
was the source of all the disputes, dipped from 1997 after the
Ballarpur Paper Mill, which used to lift 80 per cent of the grass
from the village, switched to wood-based pulp manufacturing
in a clear instance of betrayal of the village which sustained the
production of raw material all this while.(see box: All on
paper).
Sukbomajri's neighbour Dhamala also has its eyes on the
newly regenerated forest wealth. In July 1995, the
Sukhomajri's villagers were informed that the Dhamala HRMS,
which was all the while sharing the forest produce with them,
had auctioned the bhabber lease for more than half the area for
Rs 1.5 lakh, claiming, according to the new arrangement, that
this was Dhamala's share of the area.
The section of the forest land which was jointly allotted to
the Dhamala and Sukhomajri villages in 1983 for the annual
collection of bhabber is called C-4. It is part of the Haryana
reserve forest. There was always going to be friction if the
allotted land was to be divided between the two villages.
Actually, the Sukhomajri villagers have more of a claim on the
land since it was their effort that resulted in the regeneration of
forest. The Dhamala part of the forest had much more saturation of wild grass and they would benefit without having done
any hard work. The division of the C-4 section was a longstanding demand of the Dhamala village.
So the forest department simply took the map of the forest
and put a line through it saying that from now
on one side of the line belongs to one village
and the other side belongs to the second village.
This immediately led to squabbles. The villagers of Sukhomajri felt deeply cheated.
Dhamala got that part of the forest where most
of the grass grows. Often, unknowingly, people
walk across the invisible line leading to fights
among the residents of the two villages. "The
forest department and TERI support team has
created a division like the partition of the
country," says Jethu Ram. Here again the
Sukhomajri villagers suggested a solution: let
each village harvest the forest for one year in
turn. In this way each village could have got
access to all the grass every year. That village
could have decided on how to use the grass that
year - for use as fodder or for sale as raw
material for paper mills - and there would be
no chance for people of one village to walk into
the land of another village. But people's wisdom was rudely brushed aside.
But these words mean nothing to the technocrats of the forest department who invariably behave like cowboys and have no idea of how to involve
people in managing natural resources. Apart from preying on
a resource that the people have built to enhance their revenues, they are not prepared to let the people of Dhamala and
Sukhomajri sort out their differences acting only as facilitator
in the process. No, they have to butt in like lords and masters
and as a result destroy the finest people's effort in forest regeneration in the country.
Unfair taxes
HEADS | DHAMALA | SUKHOMAJRI |
Lease money | 22,985 | 21,630 |
Income tax (15.3 per cent) | 3,534 | 3,326 |
Sale tax (8.8 per cent | 2,023 | 1,904 |
Total expenses | 28,542 | 26,860 |
Re-sale price | 1,35,000 | 95,000 |
Net profit | 1,064,58 | 68,140 |
Government share (25 per cent) | 26,615 | 17,035 |
Balance (75 per cent) | 79,843 | 51,105 |
Kalyan Kosh (10 per cent of the balance) | 23,953 | 15,332ss |
HRMS share (60 per cent of the balance) | 47,906 | 30,663 |
We are a voice to you; you have been a support to us. Together we build journalism that is independent, credible and fearless. You can further help us by making a donation. This will mean a lot for our ability to bring you news, perspectives and analysis from the ground so that we can make change together.