Forest Cooperatives in India are a Model for Community Forestry

by Ashwini Chhatre, Pushpendra Rana and Satya Prasanna.

Forest in India provide a tremendous diversity of benefits to society, ranging from local subsistence uses like fodder and firewood, regional services like water cycle regulation, and global contributions in terms of endemic biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Given this diversity, it is no surprise that Indian forests are managed under an equally bewildering diversity of systems. Some of these can be traced back hundreds of years (sacred forests), while others owe their origins to recent interventions. The patchwork patterns of forest management evident in India today can be attributed to a combination of factors operating over the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as to an evolving set of objectives of forest management. Commercial timber production and biodiversity conservation have been the two most important policy objectives, and consequently, forest management has remained concentrated in provincial and federal agencies until recently. In spite of the heavy and direct subsistence dependence of millions of people on nearby forests across India, larger economic and ecological considerations have dominated forest management systems.

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