This paper emanates basically from a study on the
effectiveness of different institutional modes on the protection and sustainable
management of forests as a common property resource (CPR). Some of the
institutional alternatives available are the panchayat institutions, the state
(i.e., the forest departments), community organisations, and the collaborative
or participatory approaches developed in some departments (which have been
castigated as a violation of the Constitution by the PRI purists), like joint
forest management (JFM) in the forest department, and the school monitoring
committees in education.
Download the full pdf file https://www.academia.edu/11997756/Decentralized_governance_and_forests_in_India
The long version is here:
http://www.academia.edu/9235210/Managing_India_s_Forests_Village_Communities_Panchayati_Raj_Institutions_and_the_State
The long version is here:
http://www.academia.edu/9235210/Managing_India_s_Forests_Village_Communities_Panchayati_Raj_Institutions_and_the_State
Community management of CPRs
In the literature on common property resources, various
conditions have been suggested by scholars like the Nobel Prize awardee Elinor
Ostrom, to explain why some communities are successful in sustainably managing
their CPRs, while others fall prey to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and the
‘free-rider syndrome’. Of course Ostrom is well known on the subject, and this
is not the place to present a review of that body of work, so it must suffice
to just mention here the main understandings.
To institute a set of rules to manage a CPR, that are
acceptable and sustainable, the requirements according to Ostrom (1990) are as
follows:
1) define
a set of appropriators who are authorized to use the CPR,
2) relate
the rules to the attributes of the CPR and the community,
3) the
rules to be defined at least in part, by local appropriators,
4) the
rules to be monitored by individuals accountable to local appropriators
5) the
rules are “sanctioned using graduated punishments” (in common parlance, I
interpret this to mean that serious punishments are not imposed at the first
offence, but through a gradually rising series according to the seriousness and
frequency).
We may note, parenthetically, that a question may well be
raised whether and to what extent any community can actually hold its members
responsible for their actions. The above list of specifications still does not
explain why some self-interested individuals should not gang up to subvert the
“rules”, especially in a fast-changing world where the younger generation may
see things totally differently. To follow Ostrom’s line for the present, the
following set of variables is presented as capable of explaining the supply of
institutions in the sort of situations her case studies cover:
1) the
total number of decision makers,
2) the
number of participants needed to achieve the collective action,
3) the
discount rate in use,
4) the
similarities of interest,
5) the
presence of people with substantial leadership assets.
6) that
they have access to rapid low cost “arenas” to resolve conflicts,
7) that
the rights to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external
government agencies, and
8) that
these activities are organised in multiple layers of “nested enterprises”.
Ostrom found that successful experiments in community
management have started with small-scale institutions where people learn about
one another and build up trust by face-to-face interactions, and then gradually
build it up to higher levels and larger groups. That is, institution-building
and management learning has to proceed through an “incremental,
self-transforming process”, to be successful, when
“... individuals repeatedly communicate and interact
with one another in a localized physical setting. Thus, it is possible that
they can learn whom to trust, what effects their actions will have on each
other and on the CPR, and how to organize themselves to gain benefits and avoid
harm. When individuals have lived in such situations for a substantial time and
have developed shared norms and patterns of reciprocity, they possess social
capital with which they can build institutional arrangements for resolving CPR
dilemmas” (Ostrom, 1990, p.183/4).
We may note on the margins that this is precisely what has
been given short shrift in the polemical approach to developing local
governance through PRIs, which are to be set up all at once, at a fairly high
level (district, taluk and ‘village’, the last encompassing many settlements
and thousands of persons), with the accompanying problems of trust building
which Ostrom pointed out as crucial for natural resource management systems.
Again parenthetically, it may be noted that the strength of village forest
committees and other “parallel” community-based organisations (CBOs) referred
to above, lies precisely in that they deal with small groups of mutually known
persons in the hamlet or neighbourhood, enabling constant discussion and
negotiation of the rules and their implementation.
Joint Forest
Among observers of the CPR scene in India , Saxena
(1997) has tried to identify the factors in success and failure of various
forms of participatory forest management in different states, some of which are
as follows. In the case of Van (=forest)
Panchayats of the UP hills (now Uttarakhand), some of the
factors were: leadership quality , availability of funds, distance from road
and proximity to the forest; total area and quality of the forest land; whether
neighbours also were well-provided for; and single village panchayats fare
better than multi-village (Saxena, op. cit., p.65). In self-actuated forest protection groups in Orissa: small communities
where people know one another are more successful; upland topography makes the
forest patch visible from the settlement, hence more effective; remoteness from
market and road; dependence on forests being shared by all families in the
village are positive factors; interest taken by the village leadership is
crucial. Saxena sums up by saying
(ibid., p.81):
“We can conclude, then, that community control and
management can work in three circumstances. First, in villages which are small,
homogeneous, remote from markets, and dependent upon produce from the commons.
Second, where gains from organisation are high, for both the village elite and
the commoners. And third, where a leader is willing to oversee for non-monetary
gains”.
In another much larger study, Ravindranath & Sudha
(2004) found from their survey of 1421 JFM committees in 6 states a “marked
increase in the vegetation density and canopy cover” through plantations, and
to a lesser extent, through protection of degraded areas and encouraging
natural regeneration. A better relationship between the forest department and
the people was reported in all the states, as also women’s empowerment and
improved relationship with the local Panchayat (“except in a few where it has
led to conflict with regard to benefit sharing and management”). The people
recorded their perception of “an increase in the water table in the wells” in
West Bengal and Gujarat , as also an increase
in the moisture retention capacity of the forest soil, attributed to better
canopy and root system, and reduced run-off.
Ravindranath & Sudha drew the following “lessons” from
their survey: for success, one has to enlist the participation of all the
eligible sections (men and women), get MoUs drawn up and signed, prepare
micro-plans, and so on. They identify
the following “issues” to be addressed: JFM orders in the states should keep
pace with the more liberal policy pronouncements from the Centre; economic viability
is not addressed, and it is “necessary to adopt a demonstrably cost-effective
approach to JFM”; the relationship with PRIs needs to be studied (it has been
positive in some, like Rajasthan, but has led to problems in others); a
“national-level Monitoring and Evaluation” strategy is called for; and the
community has to be further empowered.
Saxena, talking about the relationship of Forest Protection
Committees (FPCs) with the Panchayats, appears to take a non-committal stand.
He quotes Poffenberger and Singh, 1993, that their relationships “need to be
sharply defined”, without comment. But he also cites the case of Orissa, where
the requirement that the female Naib Sarpanch (Deputy Chief) of the Panchayat
will be the head of the FPC, is “not working well and her stewardship is not
seen as legitimate by the indigenous FPCs” (Saxena, 1997, p.116). He goes on to
say that there is the danger of the small user community losing authority to
the much larger panchayat, and that panchayats have had difficulty in managing
community woodlots “due to their inherent political nature and often diverse
constituencies” (ibid., p.117).
Coming to our own small study on the subject, we looked at
three villages located in the Aravalli hills of south Haryana (Mangar, Zeer and
Bondshi), three villages in the Western Ghats of Karnataka (Shigehalli, Kalwe,
and Sirur-Balgod VFCs in Sirsi Division), and four in the hills near Vellore in
Tamilnadu (Thorumalai, Thondam Thulasi, K-Pudur, and Velleri VFCs in Vellore
Division).
 |
| Mangar bani, Haryana |
The Aravalli case study threw up some interesting insights
on the way communities are responding to pressures on forest CPRs that are,
ostensibly, in their private holdings (not reserved forests under the forest
department). With land prices sky-rocketing in the National Capital Region,
obviously the communities are under great pressure to allow divestment of the
individual holdings, and here we find that the criteria listed by the authors
cited above do not seem to be good predictors of CPR integrity or community
cohesion. One relatively homogeneous village is on the verge of losing its CPR
forest to private land developers who have purchased individuals’ holdings, in
spite of its status as a sacred grove; a second village is confidently holding
and managing its forests as a common property, in spite of the ethnic (religious)
heterogeneity and lack of economic returns; a third community has transferred
custody of its CPR to the forest department for a certain period of years.
A more detailed account of these three cases is presented in
a paper in the EPW (Dilip Kumar, 2013) (posted at
https://www.academia.edu/9234774/Village_Communities_and_Their_Common_Property_Forests). The long version is contained in a monograph (Dilip Kumar, 2014) at https://www.academia.edu/9235210/Managing_India_s_Forests_Village_Communities_Panchayati_Raj_Institutions_and_the_State. However, whatever be the character of the community that has contributed to the
vigour and resilience of their forest conservation activities, the one common
thread running through these examples has been the success in fashioning what
Ostrom terms a “nested” system of
institutions, by collaborating with the state authorities (mainly the forest
departments, but also including others like the police and development
departments, and not excluding the panchayat bodies). In the final analysis, we
have to acknowledge that it is the mutually supporting roles of the state
forest department and the community organisations that has made the programme
successful, in both the biophysical and the societal, senses. The other
factors, which can form a self-extending list as more and more exigencies are
accommodated, do not seem to be good explanators: the least successful
community happens to be the most homogeneous, with a high spiritual value for
its forest, but it seems to be powerless before the market forces due to
soaring land values.
This is not the occasion to delve deeper into the CPR or
forest question, as we are mainly engaged with exploring the relations of
communities with PRIs, the forest case providing a context illustrative of the
general situation. Of the questions we asked in our village discussions, the
one of interest here is the relationship of communities and state line
departments with the panchayati raj institutions. The response from our ten
sample villages is summarized below.
Community organisations vis-à-vis PRIs and state departments
We now consider our learnings regarding the interrelations
between the community-based activities organised by the line departments and
PRI systems. Firstly, in the communities we visited, in all the three states,
it was made patently clear that as far as the village communities are
concerned, they find no contradiction at all in the parallel functioning of
different types of institutions. In their view, panchayat bodies (PRIs) have their place, and
community-based organizations (CBOs) like village forest committees or school
committees, also have their own place (the villagers are particularly happy
with the school monitoring committees under the aegis of the education
department; as they put it, previously parents wouldn’t remember even which
class the children were in, now they are closely involved in both planning and
implementation). Again and again, in the face of repeated probing, the message
came out clearly that PRIs alone are not sufficient to meet all their
institutional needs, and there is a place for additional institutions closer to
ground-level, for example specialised institutions to manage specific
activities like JFM or education or energy or toilets or agricultural inputs or
savings and loans. The villagers themselves do not see these as rival systems,
and they recognise that they all represent the same community and work
together. They do not see any rivalry between the JFM committee and the PRI,
for example. There were no signs of hostility or jealousy from the panchayat
representatives either. Every village community we spoke with recognised that
it is difficult to impose sanctions (fines etc.) on one’s own neighbours, hence
an outside agency like the forest department is needed to implement the rules
and regulations. So uniform were these reactions, across the states, that we
decided there was no point in visiting yet other villages in other states (as
originally planned): they almost seemed to be following a written script, so
repetitive were their reactions!
This is an eminently sensible approach, and moreover in
consonance with the hoary traditions and the history of the village set-up in
India, which worked through a set of sub-committees that seem to have had the
requisite flexibility to accommodate diverse interest groups and alignments for
different contexts, as we saw from Radhakumud Mookerji’s account of the
traditional concepts and the epigraphical record (op. cit.). In effect, it
appears that any such antagonisms are more in the minds of the ‘civil society’
champions of one or the other system, and not in the community.
With regard to the role of the panchayats and the issue of jurisdiction
under the Panchayati Raj Acts, it was made clear by every community we talked
with that, while they do not have any great expectations of the panchayat
system, they do appreciate the PRIs for what they are, another rung in the
state political apparatus. Interestingly, Bondshi
panchayat, which has entrusted its CPR forest to the state forest department,
has for some reasons decided not to take a paisa from the government, and
manages on its own income (mainly the rent for land leased to para-military
forces and interest from land sold to the Haryana Police). Indeed, they
actually find it easier to work with the personnel in the line departments (as stated in one of the Sirsi
villages, they would previously hardly be aware of the identity of the forest
guard, but now he or she is like a member of the village community. Of course,
since these field staff are recruited from the local population, they may
actually be related to them in some cases, either by blood or by marriage!).
In effect, the gram or village panchayats are already farther away from the
community in the individual hamlet or settlement than the local functionary
like the forest guard, or school teacher.
They are now well aware that, in the ultimate analysis, the
panchayat is not of much relevance in protecting their CPRs, and in fact only
an umbrella legislation like the Forest Act or the Forest Conservation Act (in
the case of private forest) will come to their aid. This was obvious in the
Mangar bani (sacred forest) case in
Haryana state, where the only feasible strategy now is to appeal to the higher
courts to institute protective action under the Forest Conservation Act, 1980.
In Zeer village, they say clearly that it is the forest staff who are actually
protecting the forest from illicit fellings, and without them there would have
been considerable removals and conflicts with others, such as the people from
across the state border who might make incursions. Similar considerations
obtain in many other sectors of immediate interest to the people in smaller
population centres and hamlets.
Turning specifically to the status of the JFM committee
vis-à-vis PRI in the village self-governance system, it was apparent that the villagers
do not themselves see the JFM committees as alien or inimical to the goal of
village self-governance, or indeed (as already stated) to the Panchayat
framework. They feel that it should be a simple matter to position the JFM and
other such committees as sub-committees of the Gram Panchayat, and what is
required (if at all necessary) is to recognize this de-facto position by
inserting a line in the PRI acts. But this will be more to satisfy the
juridical experts and sticklers for so-called constitutional propriety, because
as far as the people are concerned, it is sufficient that the JFM committee is
recognized in the Forest Act and has clear powers under that Act to take
measures to protect the forest.
Equally, they value the relative autonomy of their
hamlet-level organisations, and are emphatic that these should not be placed
under the PRIs, which work at a different level on different criteria or
values. The JFM committee meets and discusses plans and budgets and other
matters in an open, transparent manner where all members are like a family. In
other words, the oft-repeated contention that no community-based organisations
should be supported outside the PRI system is completely unwarranted and not reflected
in the wishes of the people themselves (the muted demand for institutions which
Mathew bemoaned). One lady member of the village forest committee, who also
happened to be the vice-president of the village panchayat, echoed the general
sentiment when she said that nothing would get done if the VFC were put under
the panchayat. There was a repeated apprehension that matters would get
‘politicised’ in the relatively partisan environment of the PRIs, hence things
of common interest should be outside the purview of the panchayat system, which
however has its own, different, interest for the villagers.
This is also eminently understandable in the framework given
by Ostrom of the advantage to the community of having the option of calling on
other institutions or structures in society. We see the difficulty that a small
community will have in imposing a rule-based control and sanctions framework on
its own members, and hence an outside agent is required, which has the
authority of the law and government behind it. Further, it is clear that the
panchayat system by itself cannot make the hitherto neglected and powerless
village community autonomous or self-governing if the system is imposed
suddenly from above, indeed until the people have had experience of working in
smaller, face-to-face groups, as Ostrom has suggested. The village forest
committees and other special interest committees, the self-help groups, and so
on seek to do precisely this preparatory trust-forming and capacity-building
activity.
It is apparent that the committee-based
approach is also sensible if we look at Ostrom’s prescriptions on nesting of the institutions at
successive levels, and putting them under an overarching framework of the law
of the land and working with law
enforcing authorities and courts. The very hostile reaction of our PRI
theoreticians to state-sponsored institutions is actually based on a faulty
appreciation of these processes at the grass-roots, but if we do accept
Ostrom’s insights (based as they are on observation of a wide gamut of
situations), the JFM approach would look as though it has been designed on the
basis of the Ostrom framework, which the forest departments have arrived at
mainly through their own common sense and field experience.
We have to recognize that the Gram Panchayat itself is a
fairly distant institution, and not equivalent to a small group at the
doorsteps of the villagers. In other words, it is quite clear that the Village
or Gram Panchayat is itself nothing but a replication of the state structures,
except that the central role is transferred from the career bureaucrat (petty
though he may be), to the part-time people’s representative. It should be
considered as the last level of the state apparatus, rather than the highest
level of the village community. It appears a bit over-optimistic to expect this
new institution to carry out the same functions as the erstwhile government
structure, without adopting the same (bureaucratic) procedures and falling prey
to the same set of constraints.
Indeed the PRIs will not be fully functional unless they
develop their own administrative and technical cadres, as repeatedly emphasised
by writers on the subject (including the central minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar,
2002; see also his interview in The Hindu
newspaper, 22 May 2013, “Put Gram Sabhas in charge of all social sector
schemes”). Now it is very doubtful whether a viable system of recruitment,
training, supervision and so on can be set up for each discipline (sector) in
each Gram Sabha, separately. Professionals, like doctors or engineers or agricultural
specialists (or foresters), would not like to be placed under the taluk or
village bodies, but would always owe allegiance to a higher professional body
that can set standards, provide the framework for career enhancement and
mobility, adjudicate in disputes, and advocate their interests in the media and
the polity in general. The village body is unlikely to attract any professional
if they do not guarantee this functional independence and appeal to a higher
calling. If nothing else, no Gram Sabha will be able to bear the expenses of
such a force of specialists. Therefore, it may well be a pipe-dream (to borrow
the expression of despair from the PRI protagonists) to expect that the PRIs
will ever be fully staffed, and they will probably always have to manage with
officials on deputation or on consultation basis from the respective line
departments. The smart thing would be to develop the capacity of the
communities to make use of such outside expertise for the specific and limited
purposes required, rather than try to replicate the full bureaucratic and
executive set-up of the Central Secretariat in each district and panchayat in
the search for the holy grail of village self-governance or autarchy.
The implication of this is that subject-matter committees,
which are equivalent to sub-committees of the GP, are quite essential in the
line departments, if actual work has to be carried out at the ward, settlement,
or hamlet level. Even Saxena, who is usually a staunch protagonist of people’s
empowerment, concedes (1994, p.117) that:
“There is also some concern that if JFM groups were
absorbed by the village panchayat, vested interests might exert control over
decision making. Since small user communities may comprise less powerful
groups, they may lose authority to the elite if management becomes a direct
adjunct of the panchayat. …On the whole, the relationship of local forest
management groups to panchayats needs to be clarified. Simply subsuming them as
part of the panchayat would almost certainly threaten their effectiveness.”
Apparently, the people themselves are quite comfortable with
the somewhat hazy or ambiguous status of sectoral committees like the JFM
committees or school committees in relation to the village panchayat setup. It
is the outside experts who are so exercised about the legal and constitutional
niceties of the setup, to the point of injured outrage and affront at almost a
personal level, as illustrated by some of the writings quoted previously. If
our sample of villages is anything to go by, it is actually a complete
non-issue in real life. It appears that both the political, vote-based, and the
apolitical, consensus-based, approaches can, and do, co-exist in our villages,
just as at the level of the Constitution of India, we have both the elected
legislature and the appointed but statutory executive and the independent
judiciary. All these types of institutions are required for the system to
function in a self-correcting manner, and that is applicable at the state level
as at the village level.
Despite its home-grown or common-sense
approach and background, it appears that many things in the JFM programmes have
been done correctly. In trying to get a feel of the role of JFM vis-à-vis PRIs
in meeting the material needs of the villagers, and in improving living
standards and incomes, many of the communities actually spoke very warmly of
the constructive work done by the forest department. It appears that government
officials at the executive level are not merely specialists, but have experience
in getting a lot of general things done, for their own programmes and for the
communities. Indeed, once the watershed development work gives results in
better availability of water, the dependence on the forest or common property
resource seems to have naturally gone down in our sample villages. For example, across the states, we
were told that the free grazing of scrub cattle has come down drastically over
the 25 to 30 years of the JFM programmes, fuelwood removals have also been
consciously reduced, there have been far fewer forest fires over this period,
and the jungle has grown back. (But the downside is that the population of
pigs, deer and monkeys has grown to alarming levels, and the farmers are
wondering how to continue their agriculture between the animal depredations and
the diversion of farm labour to NREGA, the employment guarantee programme).The JFM programmes seem to have been able to capitalise on this
improvement in the economic condition of the villages, by providing for
training and other support for alternative
non-forestry activities to further reduce the pressure on the forests.
This is a win-win situation for those concerned.
On the whole, it would be a misconstruing
of the aims and intentions of decentralized governance or PRI if we were to say
that no other institutions have a right to exist. To the people on the ground,
there is little difference between PRI sub-committees and other community-based
or sector-driven subject committees; both are sponsored by the state and supported
by larger state organisations and departments. JFM committees can easily be
accommodated in the PRI structure as a sub-committee, but the message is also
quite clear that communities value the relative autonomy and freedom of working
a little outside the formal PRI structures. The villagers commonly say that there is “too
much politics” in the panchayats, too much public posturing and so on. For
instance, if the elected President of the panchayat
feels that a ward or a hamlet has not voted for them, it gets left out of the
panchayat programmes.
It is evident that the PRIs are better at
larger programmes and engineering works like roads, water supply, and other
infrastructure. The villagers repeatedly explained that small things that are
of interest to the local group or community, like a shed, a threshing floor, a
meeting place, training for livelihood and self employment, solar lights and
water heaters, and especially the savings and loan groups, do not figure in the
stereotyped plans of the district panchayats, but are doable in the smaller
line department committees like the VFC.
In fact local self-government was
supposed to be ‘little government’, more informal, less bureaucratic, and run
by part-time officials from among the ordinary people (as in small-town USA),
but in our country, PRIs have now been fashioned after the state legislatures
and district collectorates (even to the extent of calling for a mini-Vidhan
Soudha and a Chief Secretary in each panchayat centre), and thus brought all
the ills of ‘big government’ to the lowest level of governance. The people
therefore feel all the more need for small organisations and institutions of
their own, such as the self help groups (SHGs), school committees, and, let us
admit, the village forest committees (VFCs). Indeed the VFCs and JFM are a good
model of real grass-roots democracy in small communities much below the level
of the PRIs, which after all stop at the panchayat level, covering many
villages and settlements (wards, majras) and thousands of people. This means
that PRIs are much like government structures, and cannot be a firm ground for
developing effective community institutions based on face-to-face interactions
and personal relations and confidence-building. It will therefore be good if the
Panchayat system gives recognition to these committees even if they are not
formally under the PRIs. Joint Forest
Our interactions in all these villages
clearly brought out that there is no expressed antagonism between the two
institutions in the field, nor do the people in the communities look upon
government staff as strangers or criminals. They see both sector-based and
panchayat-driven activities and institutions as ultimately subservient to the
overall framework of the ‘law of the land’, which draws authority from the
national Constitution and the specific laws passed under it. Unfortunately the
predilection seen among intellectuals and activists commonly today is to debunk
all state agencies, and elevate an undefined ‘people’ as a new final arbiter.
This is difficult to follow in practice, however, and I am sure that none of us
actually likes to or has to deal with this last tier of governance in real
life. Even the various PRI experts have set up their centres in the country’s
capital cities, and if one goes by the information on their websites, most of
their funding is drawn from the very central ministries that they hold up as
examples of the top-down approach they profess to abjure, or from international
agencies. Even Members of Parliament and the State Assemblies, who champion so
fiercely the cause of PRIs, do not take kindly to the suggestion that the
special discretionary fund placed at their disposal for good works in their
constituencies should be subsumed in the panchayat budget. In other words, the
message is to do as they say, and not as they do. This is a typical
characteristic of human psychology, which gives the lie to their
one-dimensional polemics.
One may
ask, if the people on the ground don’t much care about the Panchayats, the
state governments are positively antagonistic to them, even the elected
representatives are chary of giving them too much space, the government
bureaucrats are indifferent, and even private operators like the NGOs and
social workers find them less than friendly, why are PRIs so universally urged
on us? A possible answer may lie in the tussle for power between the central
and state governments, and it may be interesting to test the hypothesis that
advocacy for PRIs will dip when the same parties hold substantial power at both
levels. The reason why intellectuals have this
two-headed approach seems to be that funding and recognition from research
funds and international agencies is contingent on pushing this ‘neo-liberal’
agenda, as a glance at the websites of those organisations and foundations will
readily show. This may be nothing but a continuation of the colonial strategy
of gaining ascendancy by vilifying the other and displacing it as an act of
moral superiority and piety, which the colonialists practiced in the course of
subjugating us and other oriental cultures (Said, 1995). Intellectuals fall easy prey to
this type of campaign, as they become over-sensitive to the faults in their own
culture, while becoming enamoured of the foreign one, probably because they
have neither the resources nor the platform to subject the ‘other’ (culture and
society) to the same level of intense scrutiny and analysis. They also have to
emulate faithfully the ruling trends in the western world, if they are to gain
acceptance and admittance to the international world of the intellectuals and
all its fruits and rewards. In other words, the familiar ‘asymmetry’ (a
favourite term in economics) in information, power and influence, that characterised
the colonial and neo-colonial relations, persists in this matter of
sociological analysis to this day.
An intriguing, and exciting, possibility
is that the VFCs and other community-based, small organisations may actually be
essential as a training ground for the larger democratic polity. Democracy is
achieved not by the vote alone, but by the functioning of diverse groups and
associations in small communities across the land, as recognised in the mother
of liberal democracies, the USA
“Community grows out of participation and
at the same time makes participation possible; civic activity educates
individuals how to think publicly as citizens even as citizenship informs civic
activity with the required sense of publicness and justice”. (Barber, 1984)
Especially in the case of CPRs like forest, it is abundantly
clear that there has to be some nesting of institutions and structures in
larger and higher “enterprises”, or arrangements, so that there is some
framework to refer to outside the narrow village communities. If PRI protagonists
have been lamenting that acceptance has not been achieved even after so many
decades (and huge channelling of funds to 2,50,000 gram panchayats and
constitutional amendments and elections), obviously they should look into the
basic tenets of their model and try to align it with ground reality and
people’s aspirations in a less authoritarian, less top-down manner. Perhaps
they can even learn from the JFM model, instead of reviling it as
anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, for the forest department has achieved
a silent revolution of sorts, with over 1,18,000 committees covering some 23
million hectares of state forest (leaving aside the private forest and CPR
resources), with little in the way of extra resources or constitutional
backing, comparing very favourably with the PRIs themselves.
A final comment may be interposed here
from Francis Fukuyama, a leading contemporary commentator on state and
government. Writing about “Decentralization and Discretion”, Fukuyama (2005,
pp.91 et seq.) recognizes that there has been a large push since the 1980s to
decentralize political authority to state and local government, for the same (dare
I add, ostensible) reasons that firms and organizations have resorted to
flatter, leaner structures: decision making is “closer to local sources of
information, and therefore inherently more responsive to local conditions”, it
is quicker, and can introduce competition and innovation if there are a large
number of such units (in our JFM case, in this spirit, we can think of
different communities adopting different approaches and undertaking different
enterprises). These considerations “have led some observers to suggest that
there is a long-term secular trend leading inevitably to higher degrees of
decentralization and flatness in organizational structure”, but Fukuyama
“…there are offsetting drawbacks to decentralized
organizations that will never be susceptible to technical solutions.
Decentralized organizations often generate high internal transaction costs and
can be slower and less decisive than centralized ones... The most important
drawback of decentralization concerns risk…”
Further (ibid., p.97):
“... Delegation of authority to state and local
government means almost inevitably there will be greater variance in government
performance… some subordinate units will fall below a minimum threshold of
tolerability... In more mundane fashion, the delegation of authority to state
and local government in developing countries often means the empowerment of
local elites or patronage networks that allows them to keep control over their
own affairs, safe from external scrutiny. One of the chief reasons for
recentralizing political authority is to ensure minimum standards of noncorrupt
behaviour in public administration…” (Fukuyama ,
2005, p.97).
The main consideration in putting forests
under the central government’s control through the Indian Forest Act in
colonial times, and now the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 in independent India,
is precisely this concern about their long-term integrity, an application of
the ‘precautionary principle’ that has been recognised by our apex court as one
of the bed-rocks of environmental governance. This referers to the famous Godavarman case on
forest management and conservation in the Supreme Court of India, which brings
to mind the parable of the six blind men trying to describe an elephant and
getting it all wrong. The real moral of the story, however, is that when you
are faced with such a huge enigma, instinct should make you run, not blunder
around trying to guess: an elementary application of the precautionary
principle!
Environmental conservation is something
like the proverbial elephant in the dark: there may never be clear-cut answers
to all our questions. There is no formula to achieve an optimal balance in
delegation versus centralization, or development versus conservation, in
organizations as in government. Hence scholars should not become spuriously
puritanical in their prescriptions, lest they end up like the Soviet-style
Marxists in the by-lanes of history. Marx is famously quoted as having said
that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, but that the point is,
however, to change it. We know what the consequences have been of this interventionist,
egotistical approach.
Arm-chair idealists of my generation may
still be fondly waiting for the state to wither away (starting with the forest
department, according to Lele, 2014), and it is some of those sentiments that
seem to have coloured the intellectual’s prescriptions for withdrawing the line
departments from the field and handing over everything to ‘the people’.
However, the only thing that has withered away in these hundred years of the
Marxist millennium is the revolutionary Soviet state itself, whereas the
Chinese communist state is going on as strong as ever, even as the world looks
on in wonder and approbation. If the modern Indian state apparatus moves out of
the countryside, and remains limited to the government enclaves in a few metropolitan
areas, what will move in is not the people’s self-organised committees, but
some other external power to fill the vacuum. It is in this context that there
is a case for a more sympathetic look at the joint governance model developed
by the forest department in the form of the JFM committees, and similar joint
community based organisations (CBOs) in education, health, culture, grass-roots
savings and loan groups, and other sectors.
The moral of the story, as I understand
it, is that we should let a number of different alternatives co-exist, as
neither are the communities so fragile and ignorant, nor are government and
state organisations so unmitigatedly evil or useless, as our neo-liberals would
make out, because if that had been the case, our country would not have been a
fraction as prosperous and well-managed (in relative terms) as we are today. In
the eyes of the people, of the communities, the one does not take away from the
other. From fullness, fullness comes, and fullness ever remains, as realized by
our Vedic seers many millennia in the past (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, 5.1.1, see
S.Radhakrishnan, 1953, ed. 1994, p.289).
We need a more balanced view than presented in contemporary
polemical writing, on the relationships between PRIs and other community
organisations. Not all persons in government are evil, and all outside it angels,
nor by switching roles will we attain the promised nirvana. This is like
blaming the mirror for the deformities in our visage; the state of the polity
is a true reflection of what we are as a society, and this reality cannot be
wished away. Both good and bad co-exist in all human beings, and the challenge
in governance is to keep the show going with all these constraints, in other
words to get good, if not great, things achieved by ordinary people. This, the
communities I visited have demonstrated and shared generously, and I
acknowledge and applaud them.
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