Joint Forest Management

In one line

Joint forest management is an arrangement under which a village institution protects a patch of degraded forest and receives a share of what it yields, and it was created by an executive circular rather than by any statute.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: joint forest management is the participatory forestry arrangement introduced by a circular of the Government of India in 1990, under which the forest department and a village institution share the responsibility for protecting and regenerating degraded forest land and share the usufruct that results. It gives effect to the National Forest Policy 1988's call for a massive people's movement and for the close association of tribal people in the protection, regeneration and development of forests.

The problem it answers

The forest department has a few staff and a very large estate. The people who live beside the forest are numerous, are there all the time, and have every incentive to take from it because they need fuel and fodder and have no legal claim on either.

Two consequences follow. Protection by exclusion does not work where the excluded population is larger than the protecting force and lives on the boundary. And the interests are opposed by design: the department gains nothing from the villager's welfare and the villager gains nothing from the forest's recovery.

Joint forest management is the attempt to align them: give the village an interest in the recovered forest, and the protection follows.

How it works

The instrument. A circular of the Government of India of 1990 to the States, followed by State resolutions and orders. It is administrative throughout, and this is the fact that most matters legally.

The institution. A village level body, called a forest protection committee, a van samrakshan samiti, a vana samrakshana samithi or something similar depending on the State, constituted under the State's resolution, usually with a general body of households in the village and an executive committee, and usually with the local forest officer as its member secretary.

The land. Degraded forest land, which is the crucial limitation. The arrangement was designed for land that had already lost its cover, not for good forest, and its object was regeneration rather than management of an intact resource.

The bargain. The village protects the patch from grazing, fire and felling. In return it takes the non-timber forest produce, a share of the intermediate yield from thinning, and a percentage of the final harvest, the percentage being fixed by the State's resolution.

The plan. A microplan for the patch, prepared with the department, recording what will be protected, what will be planted and what will be taken.

What it achieved

Coverage. The arrangement spread across most States and covers a very large number of villages and a substantial area of forest land, and it is by a wide margin the largest participatory natural resource programme in India.