ABSTRACT
We now turn our attention to Indian states, and first of all to West Bengal, the origin of joint forest management (JFM) policy, which has become the mainstream model for state participatory forest management (PFM) implementation in India.
West Bengal has been selected for consideration in this study for several reasons, not least because it was the first state to pilot what has now become JFM, but also because it has several distinguishing features that are complementary to PFM promotion at the grassroots level. West Bengal was the first state to carry out administrative decentralization by establishing elected panchayats down to the village cluster level in 1978, long before the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution of India established the elected three-tier panchayats framework (Chattopadhayay and Dunflo, 2004). It is also the pioneer of large-scale redistribution of land from large landholders to marginal cultivators and landless rural people. Bardhan and Mookherjee (2004) estimate that one in three landless families have received non-tradable land in this manner. The state is also the only one in the country that has had a leftist coalition government for two decades that has provided permanent tenancy rights to sharecroppers under the Operation Barga programme. These initiatives allowed the quick spread of PFM during the 1990s.
The deforestation and degradation of state forests, particularly those acquired from landlords in the early 1950s, continued up to the middle of the 1980s. The causes were many, but the major one was the failure of the forest department to protect the forests in the absence of the participation of the forest-fringe people in forest conservation and management. Joint forest management was thus introduced in order to involve rural people in the protection and management of their local forests (villages generally within 3km of the forest), jointly with the forest department, in return for entitling them to access to forests in order to collect subsistence-related forest products and to receive a share of the net income from timber sales. Starting in 1990, by the end of 2001 more than 44 per cent of all forests in the state had come under JFM, with its maximum development in the south-west of the state.
The author undertook an action-oriented research programme in South-West Bengal to assess the outcome of JFM, particularly the impact that it had had on the livelihoods of the associated forest-fringe people. The broad findings are discussed here in detail. These include some positive outcomes, such as improvement in the relationship between people living on forest fringes and the forest department, betterment of forest quality and quantity, and entitlement of the people to a share of the income from forest timber and collection of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). On the negative side, villagers have not gained decision-making powers through JFM; earn far less income than they potentially could under 222JFM management due to the non-application of appropriate technology by the forest department; suffer a lack of transparency in investment and a lack of democracy within the village community; and there is little participation by the poor and landless sections and female members of the community (Banerjee and Springate-Baginski, 2005).
