A critique of forest governance in eastern India.

AuthorChatterji, Angana P.

Abstract

This paper is contextualized within postcolonial movements for social justice and ecological restoration in India, enabled through the emergent participation of diverse and subaltern stakeholders. This paper engages shifts in forest management in India. Within this frame, it refers to public forest lands reform initiatives in Orissa, a state in eastern India. In 1997-98, assisted by the Swedish International Development Agency, a review was conducted of forest management systems in Orissa. The intention was to understand microlevel frameworks within the state toward the transfer of authority over public forest lands from the government to local communities. Using information generated by this review, this paper discusses critical concerns in Orissa.

**********

Explanations

Within movements for social change currently underway in South Asia and India, development reforms imply a multitude of contradictions and complexities to a diverse constituency of stakeholders. Such reforms instigate discussions and debate on sustainable development and raise strategic questions related to the role and responsibility of the State and international agencies to marginalized rural communities, and of community access to livelihood resources. It speaks to possibilities of social and ecological restitution that confront critical concerns of governmental decentralization, and relocation of authority and resources. This paper is informed by research connected to public forest lands reform in Orissa, a state in eastern India. In 1997-98, the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), the Swedish Government's international development assistance program, aided a review of forest management systems in Orissa. The intention was to understand microlevel frameworks within the state of Orissa toward the decentralization of forest management. A primary objective was to reframe the fabric of donor-community-government collaborations. The aim was to operationalize development mechanisms that embody the ethical commitments of postcolonial advocacy and action in India. I was involved in this process, and responsible for conducting a Statewide participatory assessment of management systems related to public forest lands. (See Chatterji, 1998.)

The SIDA review supported participatory and generative methods of inquiry. It produced openings for limited participation of citizens in decision making within consultative governmental forums on public forest lands management. The review submitted its recommendations to SIDA in 1998. These recommendations constituted a proposal for future action linked to the devolution of authority over public forest lands, requesting SIDA financing for an implementation phase in Orissa. This implementation phase would facilitate capacity building for public lands reform through a reorganization and decentralization of the forest department and support to community institutions. In 1998, India conducted nuclear experiments, and in 1999-2000 SIDA retracted its support, citing its differences over India's nuclear politics as a primary reason for its withdrawal. While implicitly committed to anti-nuclear military policies, I would like to acknowledge the problematics of North-South relations where attempts at political/military self-assertion by ex-colonies are policed and met with punitive aid sanctions. (1) Reciprocal penalties are not enforcible on countries of the Global North as they continue to set the standard for nuclear stockpiling or participate in nuclear proliferation. The history of manufactured debt, and the plundering of the resources of former colonies, makes donor aid a critical component of human rights activities in the Global South. This is especially true as the debt of the colonizers to the most underprivileged sections of these societies have never been calculated or repaid. Revoking aid impacts the most margilanized sections of these societies who, ironically, do not have access to decision making that relate to nuclear policy.

SIDA's annulment of aid, complimented by uninformed decisions made by other donor agencies in the last two years, along with the devastating cyclone of 1999, have produced severe consequences for Orissa's rural communities and public lands reform processes. (Poffenberger and Chatterji, 2000.) The lack of donor commitment to the Orissa initiatives is symptomatic of development practices where donors (or governments) responsible for disbursing substantial financial contributions fail to ensure continued support for social change. The absence of sustained political and economic commitment reflects inadequate accountability to social processes on the part of institutions whose very mandate is to enable social change. This illustrates contradictions in relations of dependency that mandate dialogue between donor agencies, governments, communities, and allies toward accountability in development. That development aid is discoursed as efforts on the part of the advanced North to facilitate economic growth in the 'poor' South, rather then commitments of the North toward taking responsibility for colonization, is part of the problem. It alters the premise of development from building local capacity for furthering equity to technological, environmental and economic modifications that advance the conditions of inequity.

This paper locates the complex histories of development in analyzing forest management processes in India and Orissa. It raises questions in relation to public forest lands reform movements with which I have been involved since 1990. Do state policies that support livelihood and sustainable environmental management facilitate local empowerment and safeguard human rights? Do such reforms destabilize the inequities that shape gender, class and caste relations in Indian society, and produce contexts within which the subaltern might be heard?

The Development Crisis in India: Gendered Inequities

The postcolonial (2) Indian state has been challenged by conflicting agendas of nation construction since independence. (3) The imagery of nationhood was linked closely to the Gandhian vision of the rural economy as the foundation for development, contradicted since its inception by Nehruvian ideals of 'progress' mediated through aggressive modern development. The Gandhian program emphasized the application of appropriate and local technologies to provide employment and livelihood to India's primarily agrarian population. Gandhi promised a liberation that encompassed economic and social security, premised on a sacred commitment that the diversity of cultural, social and spiritual traditions of India be resuscitated and feudal-colonial-postcolonial oppressions be addressed. (Baviskar, 1995:p.21., and Nandy, 1989.) Gandhi's vision of development was obscured by the ideas of Nehru and others who opted for development through large-scale industrialization, urbanization and modernization, designed to alleviate poverty and debt that ironically targeted elite and urban sections of India with residual impact on rural populations.

In the early 1950's, five year economic plans were adopted to propel India's development in industry and agriculture, and remedy the political dissension, debt, and infrastructural disarray that plagued the newly independent country. (4) While the first plan experimented with the options of labor intensive, semi-Gandhian development to satisfy the basic needs of India's population, the Second Five Year Plan in 1956 adopted the 'industrialize or perish' (5) model. (Baviskar, 1995:p.22.) This model was capital, technology and energy intensive, environmentally degrading and polluting, and "critically [positively] affected..... three powerful interest groups--capitalist merchants and industrialists, the technical and administrative bureaucracy, and rich farmers." (Ibid.) (6) Development actions succeeded in exponentially increasing India's industrial production, and radically deteriorating its land, forest and water resources. Its consequent residual impact, calculated to alleviate poverty and related socioeconomic oppressions within the most disenfranchised caste, class and adivasi (tribal) communities in India, failed to produce corresponding results. To the contrary, it has generated other forms of poverty through the devastation the livelihood base of subsistence communities. "The optimistic assumption that increased welfare due to industrial growth would automatically percolate to the poor has not been borne out by experience." (Ibid,p.25.) Economic poverty continues to deface India--as 350 million people continue to live in poverty. For over 35 percent of the country's population, development has remained unattainable. (Saxena, 2000a:p.6.) In 2001, almost fifty-four years after independence, people continue to struggle within the violence of deprivation and powerlessness, burdened by the dilemmas of everyday existence. The scale and implications of this poverty and the magnitude of its bondage is experienced by most nations of the Global South, forcing its citizens to live within a constant state of war whose conditions are languaged as impoverishment, in circumstances where their most basic human rights are violated.

Incremental changes wrought by development processes have assembled deep discord related to environmental management. "These conflicts range from the incessant battle between the forest department and local communities...." (Baviskar, 1995:p.32.), to continual collisions "between mechanized trawlers and traditional fishing boats in India's coastal waters, to the controversy over the Dunkel Draft and rights to genetic resources." (Ibid,p.33.), and intellectual property rights. These conflicts reside in ambiguous international territory mediated by historically produced social and corporate relations of power, racism and real politick. These conflicts within the post-independent State, and between States, are not simply...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT