THE PRIME Minister needs to be congratulated for his decision to set up a department exclusively in charge of wasteland afforestation. He shifted the charge from the ministry of forests and environment to the ministry of rural development, leaving several officials tongue-tied. If this step lends greater importance to the task of regreening the land, then it has not come a day too early.
In India, where vast numbers survive on what can be called a biomass-based subsistence economy -- on products obtained from plants and animals -- managing our natural resource base is a critical exercise. Decreases in land productivity result in economic crises that affect the poor, with food, cooking fuel, animal fodder, building material and medicinal plants becoming increasingly difficult to find. For most of India, a concept like the Gross Nature Product is far more appropriate to measure the village economy than the prevalent Gross National Product.
What the last decade has taught us most is that afforestation is a much more serious business than digging a few holes and planting a few saplings. A tree is like a child and giving birth is only one part, often the simplest and easiest. Nurturing the tree for the next 20 years, while it matures, takes the maximum effort. The use of the word 'wasteland' has conjured up a wrong image -- of vast tracts of barren lands lying totally unused. On the contrary, no piece of unused land can lie degraded for a long time, because India's ecology is such that any unused land will automatically turn into a forest. All wastelands in India have intense users. And it is these users who have to be involved if the planted saplings are to grow into trees.
This lesson needs learning, if this new initiative of the Prime Minister is to mean anything more than providing a kursi for yet another minister. Though this will take a lot of doing, it is all within the scope of the possible.
Firstly, it will require a unified approach towards the land resources of the country. Today, control of almost half of India's land is fragmented amongst multitudes of government departments. The result is chaos and a free-for-all on the ground, ecological destruction and declining productivity. Indian villages most commonly have revenue lands, which are controlled by the revenue departments; forest lands, under the forest departments, and village common lands under the village panchayat. The only common link is that all these lands are degraded and overgrazed. They are de facto common lands -- everybody's and yet nobody's.
Each department has its own set of rules and regulations and these are flaunted with differing success. The one rule is to keep people and their cattle out, as they constitute "biotic pressure", as foresters put it. The irony of this bureaucratic control is that if a poor villager planted trees on revenue lands, he or she could be fined for trespass -- as indeed happened to the villagers of Gopalpura in Alwar district. And, the villager foolish enough to plant trees on forest land could even be jailed under existing laws.
Obviously this system of control needs to be rehauled. But this will call for the one thing that is usually the most difficult for governments to do -- coordinate between two departments, in this case, forests and rural development. We can only hope the Prime Minister will find some way to make this possible.
Secondly, numerous examples across the country have shown the starting point of wastelands development is water and not trees. Once a small water harvesting structure is built and an equitous system evolved for sharing the common water, the village community will acquire a real interest in protecting and regreening the catchment of its water system. Water binds private fields, cattle and self-interest to the health of the common land.
Therefore, village planning and not just land policy needs to be holistic and unified. Today, planning is sectoral and fragmented. Wastelands authorities are interested in trees and not water, whereas those interested in water are not interested in trees. Both, in any case, think big and not small, so the result is the village pond without its protected catchment becomes nothing more than a hole in the ground -- silted and dry. Trees keep getting planted, but they never survive.
Thirdly, afforestation needs appropriate institutions. Trees have to be planted and protected by the people, but for this to happen, the government must rethink the kind of institutions it wants at the village level.
The biggest failure of the last 40 years has been that the government has tried to do everything itself -- from building factories and roads to planting trees and grasses. People have participated, but only when the government has planned. What is clear is that India's vast environmental resources cannot be managed by centralised bureaucracies.
Wastelands development demands democratic village-level institutions that are in control of their own natural resource base. They must plant their own trees and benefit from them. Otherwise, planting trees will remain an exercise in juggling numbers on paper. Hence, the nature of village institutions should be such, they can promote consensus and openness in decision-making at the village level. It is in this context that the Panchayati Raj bill, which is still in Parliament, becomes important. It must be formulated, keeping the needs of wastelands development in mind.
Colonel Ram Singh must keep in mind that digging pits in the ground is the easiest task on which to spend money. It is ensuring the survival of the saplings planted in the pit that is the more complex task for a government to take up. He should start by learning from the mistakes of his predecessors, or else India will lose another decade beguiled by false hopes.
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