Revisiting the issues
This final section is to go over the main points made
previously, and pull together the various suggestions made. The essay seeks to
understand the current feeling of discontent with the forest service in India,
and the various pressures for change and modernization from different quarters;
and what sort of response the forest service has made, or should be making, in
dealing with actual activities as well as dealing with public perceptions.
A pdf of the entire article is available at https://www.academia.edu/24965216/Modernizing_the_Indian_Forest_Service_from_command_to_collaboration
A pdf of the entire article is available at https://www.academia.edu/24965216/Modernizing_the_Indian_Forest_Service_from_command_to_collaboration
Section I (Post 37) set the broad background and agenda of the
essay, by recounting the main strands of contemporary critique of the forest
service. These include such issues as: 1) the identification of the forest
service with the colonial regime, serving those interests under cover of
concepts like ‘scientific’ or ‘sustained’ forestry; 2) the need to replace the
top-down agenda of the forest service with an alternative ‘bottom-up’ approach predicated
by transfer of rights to the people; 3) the need to infuse more scientific
content into the activities of the forest service; 4) the related need to
develop specialization and professionalism, e.g. in wildlife management, even
to the extent of splitting the service; 5) the need to test the competence of
forest officers as specialists through their success in publishing papers in
peer-reviewed media; 6) the need to broad-base lines of recruitment into the
service, even bringing in people from civil society through lateral entry, and
reverting to the state services by doing away with the all-India service; 7) giving
primacy to civil society influence on the priorities and strategies to be adopted
rather than allowing the service to take final decisions; and so on.
Section II (Post 38) drew the parallels of the present-day forest
service with the classical bureaucracy described by Max Weber, the German
sociologist, in his early 20th century writings. Reference was also
drawn to contemporary American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s analysis
of the early success of the US Forest Service, similarly based on recruitment
of young aspirants from the open market, strong professional ethos, shared
values and esprit-de-corps, etc., that made the USFS one of the best examples
of effective state bureaucracy. However too much acquiescence to diverse
agendas from civil society, especially for fire prevention, resulted in the USFS
losing its original focus, leaving it in a less than happy state today. Something
similar seems to have befallen the once fighting-fit Indian Forest Service as
well, although the seed of its decline was probably an over-indulgence of
industrial interests, rather than over-emphasis on fire protection as in the US
case.
Section III (Post 39) traced the hoary traditions of social
scientists’ engagement with the forest rights question, starting from the great
Karl Marx’s essay on the “Wood Theft Law” in 19th century Germany. This
clearly demonstrates how matters of forest control, that appear to the forester
to be straightforward questions of the administrative set-up, are transformed into
much larger questions of the relationship of the state to the individual and
the status of basic human rights. However, the founding father of colonial
forestry, Dietrich Brandis, observing the aftermath of the distribution of
forests to the communities in the 1848 ‘revolution’ in Europe,
could discern the ill-effects of such divesting of ownership, confirming his
championing of a certain degree of state control on use and misuse of forests
to guarantee sustainability to posterity. Another example of social commentary
on state control of forests was drawn from James Scott’s work on the repeated failure
of state-sponsored social engineering, of which the ‘scientific’ sustained
yield forestry of 19th-century Europe, especially Germany (on which much of organized
forestry in the colonies is modeled), was once again the
favourite case study.
Section IV (Post 40) took up the call for improving scientific
expertise and developing foresters as scientists of international repute. The
impediments to developing a scientific or scholarly career in the midst of the
routine demands of the job, were explained. In order to provide opportunities
for the brightest among the forest officers to develop such a scholarly, advanced,
academic competence and recognition, a few schemes had been proposed in the ministry
during 2010-12. The first of these to be implemented is the Hari Singh
Fellowship for IFS probationers, which sends the selected officers to a year’s
specialized course in subjects like wildlife, immediately after the initial
professional training at the IGNFA Dehradun. Other parallel proposals, i.e. the
C.R.Ranganathan award for overseas study, the S.K.Seth award for middle-level
officers, and the Dietrich Brandis award for senior and retired officers, have not yet
been initiated. The point was made that developing excellent specialists does
not end with the initial specialized course, but calls for a protracted period
of dedicated effort on the part of the aspirant, complemented by support and approval
from the service and department, as well as mentoring and collaborative work with
persons of eminence in the chosen field, both at home and abroad. This is how
the current experts like Ullas Karanth (wildlife) have been developed, and the forest service needs to study and emulate such processes if the current crop of young
hopefuls (the Hari Singh fellows) are to make something of their initial start
on the road to eminence as specialists.
Section V (Post 41) explained the traditional resistance of the
forest service to splitting the service between forestry and wildlife, and to
the even more extreme suggestions of the National Forestry Commission (2006) of
making additional cadres for social forestry and for research and working
plans. It was suggested that the disillusionment with the service of prominent personalities,
like Valmik Thapar, could be ascribed to a basic cultural gulf from the
middle-class members of the service. Another concerted effort, spearheaded again
by persons like Thapar, was to split off the forests and wildlife as a separate
department from the environment ministry. This was shot down by the committee
of secretaries in the government of India, leading to much heartburn among the
proponents, but it is suggested that the service should move towards
integration with related fields like environment, rather than seeking to
isolate itself. It was pointed out that the two pressures were internally
discordant: one, for making the service sharply focused on specializations, and
the other, making it inclusive and broad-based by opening recruitment to all types of graduates and
providing for lateral entry from civil society at the highest levels, and so
on.
Section VI (Post 42) addressed the tension between increased specialization
and broader inclusive strategy in aspects such as recruitment to the service
and applying science in forest management. The point was made that there cannot
be a fundamental objection to allowing graduates in social sciences to compete
in the IFS recruitment process conducted by the UPSC, but because classical
sustained yield forestry had a strong base in measurement of trees and crops
and calculation of financial criteria, a certain level of mathematics has been
traditionally demanded at entrance itself. This is provided for in the UPSC
exams by the requirement that at least one of the science papers should have
been given in the undergraduate degree, and Statistics being one of these, it
is conceivable that social sciences graduates could find themselves eligible if
they had given Statistics at their Bachelor’s degree level. The suggestion was
made that the eligibility clause could be expanded to include the post-graduate
level as well, as many MA programmes do have Statistics as a mandatory paper
(especially in economics, sociology, anthropology, if not others).
More critical for the modernization of the service,
however, is the need to identify aspirants who have a certain flair or passion
for nature, outdoors activity, and working with a field force and local communities.
An analysis of the changes made in the UPSC selection process in 2012 was
presented, with the clear indication of the rapid ascendance of engineering
graduates in recent batches. This suggests great challenges to the training
institution (IGNFA), as well as opportunities on the assumption that these engineering
graduates will have superior mathematical, computer, and technical skills. The
irony is that the most popular papers chosen in the exams were Forestry and Geology,
not the physical sciences; the advantage imputed in past years to forestry
graduates was thus eliminated and, ironically, the relative ease of scoring in
Forestry was taken advantage of by the engineering graduates. For comparison,
it was noted that a similar role was played by social sciences like Politics
or History in the main civil services exams.
While the training institute (the IGNFA Dehradun) has made
many changes to the training curriculum and techniques over the years that seem
to have improved the competence and morale of the young entrants, it was
suggested that an overhauling of the curriculum may be called for in response
to the changed forest policy environment. For instance, the ecological and
social role of forests being of the highest priority, in contrast to industrial
material or financial returns, it may be desirable to reverse the very order in
which these concerns are introduced. Rather than starting with measurement of
volume and growth in the first hill tour, perhaps the initial emphasis should
be on the environmental conservation angle of hill forests, followed by the
patterns of dependence of local communities and the political economics of
common property use and management. Production forestry could be introduced at
a later stage, and the accent could be on the role of financial criteria in
private forestry, rather than on conversion of natural forests. The main texts of
the social (and judicial) critique of the traditional sustained yield forestry,
and the modifications introduced by the concepts of sustainable forestry,
should be presented and processed in depth.
Section VII (Post 43) discussed the knotty issues surrounding the
role of forestry in the universities. It was argued that the very motivation
for these courses (which were initiated in the 1980s) was somewhat confused, as
protagonists of these courses seemingly thought that the graduates would be
destined to take up the actual implementation of afforestation programmes. This
approach was based on a wholly unjustified and unjust judgement that the forest
departments were not capable of taking up the responsibility. The result is that
these forestry graduates are caught between two posts: they are not guaranteed
any positions in the state forest departments (they have to go through the same
competitive process as all other eligible graduates for the forest services),
and they have to strive extra hard to develop research projects as they do not
have easy access to field forestry resources. Often university graduates drift
to socio-economic critiques of forestry as an alternative to bio-physical
research (which is highly demanding of time and logistics support), and thus become
somewhat adversarial to the state forest departments. All this does not bode
well for the future growth of forestry as a science. In this respect, some of
the forest industries like MPM Bhadravathi, ITC Bhadrachalam, WIMCO, etc. seem
to have done much better forestry research, utilizing the services of the
self-same university graduates in collaboration with some retired forest
officers. However, social environmentalists do not think much of these efforts
as they have an ideological bias against forest industry, monocultures, etc.
Section VIII (Post 44) discussed the issues concerned with
research, and the need to make the scientists in the forest research institutes
feel an integral part of the forest establishment. Efforts may be required to
improve access of scientists to some of the senior administrative posts in the
Council. Recruitment processes of scientists may need to be decentralized, or
at least dispersed to the outlying institutes and centers, to overcome the
impression that persons from Uttarakhand state or Dehradun have a differential
advantage. The two-edged nature of the move toward autonomy of the ICFRE was
discussed; it appears that the more the Council attempts to ask for autonomy,
the more it ends up as neither the ministry’s baby nor effective on its own. The
budgets provided by the central government are now just sufficient for meeting
the establishment and routine expenditure of the ICFRE, and it would be
advisable to at least double the budgets over the course of the current Plan
period, so that the institutes will be in a position to take up more
activities. Since field forestry is the central mandate of the forest
departments, the ICFRE institutes will need to forge strong ties with them, both
for research agenda setting and for field activities. Some comparative figures
of the size of forest scientist personnel from China and India was presented to
show the need to increase the sheer numbers, so as to achieve a ‘critical mass’
in our forest institutes.
Section IX (Post 45) dealt with the need to make effective use of
communication and information media, emulating some of the NGO groups who have
been successful in their advocacy programmes. With the rising public interest
in natural history, conservation, climate change, environmental conservation, sustainable
development, poverty alleviation, protection of indigenous and traditional
cultures, and so on, the type of information put out will have to be improved.
No longer will official reports on annual budgets satisfy the hunger for
information and intellectual stimulation. Actually the forest service is in a relatively
advantageous situation here, as it has assured access to the best and remotest
natural areas, tribal centers, and so on. The forest departments have
undertaken innumerable experiments in all these spheres, including working with
tribals. These experiences need to be described, developed as case studies and
documentaries, and put out on the media in such a way as to bring out the voice
of the people on the ground, rather than as drab official reports. The help of
creative media persons could be taken to develop such material. Ideas for
certain new institutions like a Knowledge Forum, a Center for Information and
Documentation, and even an Institute for
Sustainable Forestry, have been presented to enable such creative work
and provide appropriate forums for collaboration with civil society resource
persons outside the walls of the ministry.
Should the forest service be responsive?
Finally, the question arises whether the situation is
really so serious as to warrant a response. Many foresters may feel that the
criticisms are merely idle commentaries by social academics and activists who
seek to gain popularity by such activities, and that the forest department can
continue with its traditional approaches and ignore them. On the other hand,
many foresters themselves have striven to develop a new paradigm for the
department, for example through the devise of joint forest management (JFM). With
a large number of academics and professionals getting involved in research and
advocacy on behalf of community rights, as exemplified by the Forest Rights Act
campaigns, it is unlikely that the forest service will be allowed to go on with
its activities without modification. Hence it will be necessary for the service
to organize its own study and analysis of such questions, in a framework
acceptable on the stage of public academic discourse, complete with comparative
analysis, case studies, time-line studies, and so on, so that the forest
service can take part in an informed and competent way in these discussions.
A similar question was examined in connection with joint
forest management in the author’s paper in the Karnataka Forest Department’s
journal Myforest (Dilip Kumar, 1990).
The point was made that the forest department should be in a central leadership
position in this sphere, rather than be at the receiving end of innovations
imposed from outside. If the experiment were to prove a success, the positive
contribution of the department would be recognized and the service gain some
improvements in its image and influence. If the experiment were to come apart
and become a failure, the department would at least be in a situation where the
situation could be rapidly retrieved and the negative effects minimized. Keeping
aloof would only reinforce public perception of the service as uncooperative or
hidebound and inflexible. In any case, it would be to the long-term advantage
of the service, and the cause of forests, that the service be sensitive to the needs
and desires of the people, as well as to the aspirations, perceptions and
frustrations of the political class and their fellow-travelers, the social
activists.
This article, as all others on this site, is the intellectual property of the author, P.J.Dilip Kumar (IFS, Retired). You are welcome to reproduce it with due acknowledgement. Suggested citation is as follows:
Dilip Kumar, P.J. Year. “TITLE”. Forest Matters, Nos. xx-xx (Month & Year). Available at: www.forestmatters.in or www.forestmatters.blogspot.in
Saxena , N.C. New
Delhi .
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