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Forest Rights Foster Self-Sustaining Villages In Maharashtra’s Gondia Forest Rights Foster Self-Sustaining Villages In Maharashtras Gondia Two villagers of Dhamditola collecting tendu leaves that bud once a year between March and May generating sizable revenues for the villagers. They got the rights over these minor forest produce in 2013 through the Forest Rights Act, 2006. Photo credit: Lalit Bhandarkar. The recognition of community forest rights has altered the lives of forest villagers of Gondia for the better, increasing employment opportunities and reducing distress migration By Flavia Lopes |13 Apr, 2022 Gondia (Maharashtra): The setting sun painted the sky a ripe orange as Pawar Singh Hidme–a lean 45-year-old man from the tribal community of Gond, dressed in a plain shirt, khaki pants with a pink gamcha (scarf) around his neck–took us on a tour of his farm. “Twelve different types of produce–lemon, jamun, chillies, onions, garlic, mango, papaya, rice, guava, lima beans, chickpea lentils and pigeon peas,” Pawar Singh said, with evident pride. His farmland is surrounded by forest on three sides. Mahua, tamarind and baheda trees shaded sparse grass and small shrubs, and a stream flowed on one side. Birdsong trilled over the landscape; birds returning to their homes occasionally landed to drink from the stream. It was not always like this. Until 2009, Hidme was considered an “encroacher” on this land. His father was routinely arrested for cultivating on the land; the copies of complaints registered against him served as evidence when the family applied for forest rights under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006 (FRA). This is the first of a two-part series, “Mava Nate, Mava Raaj– My village, My rules”, on how this Act, and the rights villagers got through it, have changed the lives of the people of Gondia. This first part talks about the economic transformation of the villages, and the second part, to be published on Friday, is about the impact of the Act on women and the youth of the villages. In 2013 his village Dhamditola, along with 100 other villages, received community forest rights (CFR) over 295 hectares of land, which allowed them to use and access non-timber forest produce for sale and livelihood purposes. Soon after receiving CFR, the residents decided to wrest control of tendu leaves and mahua flowers–a major source of income particularly during the lean season–from the forest department. Thanks to the granting of cultivation rights and the taking over of the tendu and mahua, the income for the tribals in these villages in Gondia, a backward district in Maharashtra, has risen steadily since 2013. Hidme used his increased income to diversify, and to cultivate the 12 different crops he grows on the 1.49 hectare individual forest title that he got under the 2006 Act. In 2019, he installed a solar-powered borewell to irrigate his land, and this further increased his profit margin. As of 2022, Hidme and other villagers from Dhamditola village are contesting a case seeking rightful compensation against the Adani-owned Raipur-Rajnandgaon-Warora Transmission Ltd. that passes through their community-owned forest. The life trajectory of Hidme, from alleged encroacher to owner of the land, is an example of how the Forest Rights Act can empower people from the Scheduled Tribes to take control of the land they were earlier denied. Hidme and his fellow community folk in the region have, thanks to the FRA that includes both individual forest rights and community forest title for the village as a whole, seen their lives altered for the better; distress migration has reduced as employment and income-generating opportunities increased. Labourers to owners A modest hut stands in a corner of Hidme’s farmland. He calls it his “workshop”–it is where he stores the farm produce till it is time to take it to market. Last year, his land produced revenue of over Rs 1 lakh–not counting the income from collecting tendu and mahua leaves in the months of March to May, a period that brings in Rs 10,000-15,000 per family member. Prior to 2013, the forest department engaged the villagers as labourers, and sold the produce to traders. “The forest department would directly give a contract to a trader, who would hire villagers at a daily wage of Rs 100-150,” said Narayan Fulsingh Salame, Dhamditola’s current gram sabha secretary. “It would be a basic collection wage. The trader never regarded our rights over the produce, nor did he give us a share in the profits that he made”. “The traders had a monopoly and they would exploit us,” Baleshwar Mansaram Kumble, a 53-year-old resident of Dhamditola, told IndiaSpend. “Sometimes they would not hand out the money unless we gave them 100 additional leaves. They would claim that this was to compensate for any leaves from the harvest that were not up to standard. At other times, they would insist that we had not collected the contracted amount of leaves, and reduce our wages.” Each year, the villagers and forest dwellers collect Rs 2 lakh crore worth of non-timber forest products (NTFP), which includes mahua and tendu, from the country’s forests, as per the Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation (TRIFED), an arm of the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs. Mahua flowers, fruits, seeds and bark are turned into wine or ayurvedic medicine, and tendu leaves that bud once a year are mostly used to roll bidis, which are cheap cigarettes with unfiltered tobacco. In 2013, one hundred villages, including Dhamditola, in the Gondia district applied for forest rights under FRA 2006. The Act recognises two kinds of rights: Individual forest rights that allow an individual the rights to hold, self-cultivate and live in forestland, and CFR that confer rights over community forest resources, including minor forest produce such as tendu leaf and mahua flowers, and also gives forest-dwelling communities the authority to manage forests. Since 2013, CFR of close to 6,500 villages spanning about 800,000 hectares–equivalent to five times the size of Delhi–have been recognised in the Vidarbha region. The majority of Dhamditola’s residents are members of the Gond tribe, one of India’s largest indigenous communities, numbering around 1.6 million in Maharashtra. For centuries, they have inhabited

Recognition of forest rights in Gondia’s forest villages has increased a sense of ownership and responsibility in the villagers over their forest resources, leading to the adoption of a wide range of sustainable forest management practices. ByFlavia Lopes|11 Mar, 2022 Gondia (Maharashtra): It is a mid-February afternoon. Dhansingh Janglu Dugga, a lean, rugged 55-year-old gond adivasi, has come home from his daily wage job under the government’s rural jobs scheme. There is a wedding in his village, Dhamditola, and the supervisor has given him the rest of the day off. “It is off-season,” Dugga said, explaining why he is doing work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for a meagre pay of Rs 200 per day. By mid-March, all the villagers, including Dugga, will go back to collecting the mahua flowers, fruit, seed and bark, which are turned into wine or ayurvedic medicine, and Tendu leaves, that bud once a year, and are mostly used to roll bidis. The season lasts from March to May, but those three months will generate sizeable revenues. By June, when the season is over, most of the villagers will go back to farming or take up daily-wage jobs. Dugga and Dinesh Uicke–also from the same village–are tasked with a different responsibility: that of forest guards, responsible for patrolling the forest area, staying alert to prevent the theft of wood and keeping a check on forest fires. Dhamditola is one of several villages in Gondia district in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region that have banned setting fire to the forest floor after the tendu and mahua season. These villages have also demarcated fire lines and increased fire monitoring and patrolling, all of which have reduced forest fires and led to the regeneration of forests. Forest fires are becoming more extreme and widespread globally because of the changing climate. India recorded 345,989 forest fires between November 2020 and June 2021, double the earlier recorded figure of 124,273 between November 2019 and June 2020. Maharashtra alone recorded 34,025 incidents, most in Gadchiroli, Gondia’s neighbouring district. Gondia is one of the most backward districts in India, according to the Niti Aayog. Since 2013, community forest rights (CFR) of close to 6,500 villages, spanning 794,118 hectares–equivalent to five times the size of Delhi–have been recognised in the Vidarbha region, under the Forest Rights Act of 2006.This was not confined to Vidarbha. Across the country, close to 100,946 community forest rights claims have been recognised, covering over 4.7 million hectare of forest land, nearly equal to the land area of Haryana, as of February 2022. The result of CFR recognition is an increasing sense of ownership and responsibility among tribal villagers, who have adopted a range of sustainable forest management practices and enforced fines for offences such as illegal logging, hunting, setting fire to the forest floor, dirtying ponds and other water bodies, all of which has improved the local ecology, benefiting the locals, both economically and socially. Secure rights over forest land motivates forest dwellers to manage and regenerate forests. This in turn creates local employment, reduces distress migration and contributes to food and livelihood security. This helps in building local adaptive capacity to deal with crises, wrote Tushar Dash in a January 2022 policy brief. From encroachers to protectors When Dugga was young, there were regular instances of forest fires, each outbreak requiring the villagers to race to put it out. “We would fetch water from any nearby pond to put out the fire,” Dugga recalled, in a mix of Hindi and the local Gondi dialect. “Even though the land was with the forest department, we would all help in putting out small fires since our livelihood depended on the forest.” But back then, forest department officials would arrest villagers, alleging that they had set fire to the forest floor. The forest surrounding Dugga’s village is a source of livelihood. Villagers cultivate rice on bare patches of land inside the forest, harvest forest produce such as tendu leaves (Diospyros melanoxylon), mahua flowers (Madhuca longifolia) and baheda fruit (Terminalia bellirica), and also collect wood for their cooking fires.Though their livelihoods depended on the forests, they had no ownership, until 2013–which meant that they were regularly harassed by forest officials for entering forest premises and using forest produce. At times, FIRs were filed against them; at other times, there would be scuffles between the forest guards and the villagers. In 2006, the central government initiated the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, a law that set out to formally recognise that forest-dwelling communities had a right over forest land. Since its enactment, the FRA has “assigned rights to protect around 40 million hectares of community forest resources to village level democratic institutions”, said the 2009 Forestry Outlook Study of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. This accounts for 56% of the 71.22 million hectares of forests, as estimated in 2019; this is now accessed and used by a fourth of India’s villages, reported a 2015 study by the Washington D.C.-based Rights and Resources Initiative, a global coalition for forest policy and reforms.In 2013, over 100 villages of Vidarbha, including Dugga’s village Dhamditola, were granted community forest rights, which meant that the gram sabha of the village would own and manage forest land in its jurisdiction. Dhamditola got collective forest titles over 290 hectares of forest land. Motiram Kaliram Sayam was a gram sabha member when the CFR titles were given in 2013. Now ageing and no longer active, Sayam recalls that the first thing the gram sabha did on receiving forest rights was to put stringent rules in place. “With ownership,” he said, “comes responsibility.” Guardians of the forests Anjoura Samru Netam worked as a village kotwal (a medieval term first used to denote the leader of a fort, and later used by the British for police officers) for over 10 years. As a village kotwal, his main duty was to communicate information to the villagers about gram panchayat meetings, village festivals, orders passed by the gram sabha, and so on. After 2014, he had a new set of responsibilities, including informing villagers about the

Pages 18-22 FOREST/COMMUNITY RIGHTS India’s forest republics By Ishan Kukreti Story of Gopal Mansaram Kumeti of Damditola (Deori), Story of Dongartamashi (Armori) 56 villages in Gondia and Gadchiroli districts collectively earned Rs. 110 Crore in 2013-20 by managing their forest resources