Village Forests and Protected Forests

In one line

Two more classes of forest: one assigned to a village to use and manage, and one where everything is allowed except what has been prohibited.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: section 28 empowers the State Government to assign to a village community the rights of Government to or over any land which has been constituted a reserved forest, and to constitute it a village-forest; section 29 empowers the State Government to declare any forest land or waste land which is not included in a reserved forest but is the property of Government, or over which Government has proprietary rights, to be a protected forest; section 30 empowers it to reserve trees and to prohibit quarrying, the removal of forest produce and the breaking up of land in a protected forest; section 32 is the rule-making power for a protected forest; and section 33 provides the penalties.

Village forests

Section 28(1). The State Government may assign to any village-community the rights of Government to or over any land which has been constituted a reserved forest, and may cancel such assignment; and all forests so assigned shall be called village-forests.

Section 28(2) empowers the State Government to make rules for regulating the management of village forests, prescribing the conditions under which the community may be provided with timber or other forest-produce or pasture, and their duties for the protection and improvement of the forest.

Section 28(3) provides that all the provisions of the Act relating to reserved forests shall, so far as they are not inconsistent with the rules, apply to village forests.

Three things follow, and they are the whole examinable content.

A village forest is a reserved forest first. The land must already have been constituted a reserved forest under sections 3 to 20, with the settlement of rights that entails. So the village receives an assignment of the Government's rights, not a recognition of its own.

The assignment may be cancelled. Section 28(1) says so in terms.

And the community owes duties. The rules prescribe its duties for the protection and improvement of the forest.

Village forests are the ancestor of joint forest management, and they have been used very little: most States constituted almost none. The idea that a village should manage the forest it uses had to be reinvented as policy in 1988 and as a right in 2006, and section 28 had been on the statute book since 1927.

Protected forests

Section 29(1). The State Government may, by notification, declare the provisions of the chapter applicable to any forest-land or waste-land which is not included in a reserved forest but which is the property of Government, or over which the Government has proprietary rights, or to the whole or any part of the forest-produce of which the Government is entitled, and such land shall be called a protected forest.