Western Ghats Forestry Project, Karnataka (1992-2002)
The Western Ghats
Forestry (and Environment) Project (WGFP) is cited here specifically, as it was
probably the first externally-aided project to make institutional development
and policy change its central objective (and also one of the earliest instances
of the transition from the physical-output oriented social forestry projects).
It is also interesting because there was a major progression from the original
proposal of the Karnataka Forest department (KFD) in 1987 (Hobley &
Shields, 2000, p.21), which was focused mainly on improving the ecological
status of the Western Ghats forests in Karnataka. This was prompted by the
department’s perception that the preceding social forestry projects had shifted
attention disproportionately to non-forest and degraded forest areas, to the
detriment of the ecologically richer forests of the Western Ghats, which were now
in dire need of greater investment. Some of the crying priorities in the
department’s view were protection from fire, poaching, encroachment, etc.;
interventions to encourage regeneration, improve density of growing crops, regenerate
blanks and treat insect and disease problems; and so on. But the NGOs and
environmentalists put up such a forceful opposition to such a techno-centric
proposal (see the interviews with one of the leading NGO activists, Pandurang
Hegde, in the webpage of New
Internationalist magazine, October 2004)[1],
that the British aid agency DFID (or the ODA as it was then known) transformed the whole project
into a process-oriented one, and insisted on a process of consultation with
local communities for the interventions (including plantations) on the ground.
(A pdf file of the entire article is available at https://www.academia.edu/21490696/Forest_Landscape_Restoration_in_India_Antecedents_experience_and_prognoses)
 |
| Degraded hillsides in North Canara. Masur-Lukkeri, one-year planting. Only exotic Acacia is visible! (Viewed 1990) |
Throughout the project
period, teams of DFID consultants were busy on the ground, working with the
frontline staff of the department and with communities, designing new planning
and monitoring systems to make them bottom-up and ecologically sound (such as
Site-Specific Planning or SSP, participatory planning manuals[2]
to replace the less flexible Working Plan Code, computerized database and MIS, computerized
accounting and reporting systems, strategic planning decision tools, etc.). Naturally, implementation of the JFM
guidelines on the ground was a high priority, so field manuals were drawn up,
training given to FD staff, community representatives, NGO support groups,
etc., and scores of new village forest committees (VFCs) initiated and set on the path to formulating
micro-plans, signing up to MoUs, and taking up operations on the ground.
The physical targets
of plantations of various models (fuelwood/small timber, artisanal raw material
like bamboo, fruit/fodder, assisted natural regeneration or ANR, etc.) were
substantially fulfilled, totaling to some 50,000 ha as provided in the
financial schedules of the project document.
The fuelwood/small timber plantations (mainly of Acacia auriculiformis and Casuarina,
both exotics but in use for many decades, and both having nitrogen-fixing
nodules in their root systems) was believed
(by the FD) to have substantially reduced the extraction of wood by cartloads
from the forests for keeping the home fires burning as well as running hundreds
of brick kilns, eateries, tile manufacturies, etc. in the adjoining zones.
This was especially
gratifying, as there was a high perennial demand for wood in the cold and wet
climate of the Western Ghats. There used to be a particularly pernicious system
of pre-paid licenses, under which thousands of cartloads of fuelwood,
inevitably mixed up with illicitly felled teak, rosewood and other valuable
timbers, used to be allowed under the old privileges, that had been terminated
by a particularly courageous minister in the early 1970s (see Shyamsunder and
Parameshwarappa, 2014, for an account of this reform). As a consequence, the
department had taken on the responsibility of providing the material at
controlled rates from a network of depots in the Western Ghats belt and the
adjoining plains.
 |
| Greening bare hillsides with Acacia (2-year old) (Viewed 1990) |
Acacias from Australia
were not anathema to foresters, who saw in it a hardy, self-regenerating (at least in some localities), nitrogen-fixing species with a host of
uses, both as smallwood (the timber itself was found to have strength and
finish properties close to teak), and as mulch from the leaf litter (a crucial
component of agriculture in this high-rainfall zone, see Nadkarni et al.,1989).
Acacia auriculiformis came as a boon in reforesting the highly
degraded, eroded, laterised bare hillocks around the forest tracts, and
experiments was also being undertaken of interplanting with more ecologically
acceptable local species like Emblica,
rosewood, Pterocarpus, Lagerstroemia, Terminalia, Adina, etc.
in thinned out plantations taking advantage of the improved organic structure
of the soil after a few years. Even the relationship of the FD with
communities, which tended to be patronizing (as employers and granters of
favours) or coercive in the past, have been transformed with the partnership
approach under JFM, as readily shared by VFC groups visited by the author (Dilip
Kumar, 2014).
 |
| Kalam (Mitregyna parvifolia) interplanted in Casuarina, 2-year old (Viewed 1990) |
From the point of view
of the FD, therefore, the project was surely a resounding success, but it ran
into very strident criticism from many quarters. One was the familiar burden of
the social environmentalists, which is well represented by Sharachchandra Lele (2003).
Some of the grounds for criticism are
that by restricting the JFM mechanism to degraded forest (less than 25%
canopy), it ended in putting valuable village grazing lands under tree crops; the process of formation of VFCs, micro-plan
creation and VFC functioning tended to be top-down; there was insufficient
attention to “community mobilization and awareness building” so that “VFCs so
formed could not generally free themselves from the inherent economic, caste
and gender inequalities within villages”; and so on (Lele, op. cit.). Critics
seem especially incensed by the fact that in many cases,
plantations were even raised before the VFC was formed, and many times VFCs
were given older existing plantations to protect as an incentive (bribe?). Of
course, for the FD, such criticisms appear to be mere quibbling. However, Lele does
concede that there were some benefits, mostly intangible, like freer
interaction between village communities and FD staff, acceptance of the
philosophy of people’s participation, and so on (Lele, 2003).
There are apparently
two different agendas at work here. The FD personnel, like most government
agencies, are keen to get on with the job and achieve concrete results,
answerable as they are to audit and the elected government for the money being
spent (no matter it comes as a grant from the donor to the central government),
and bound as they are by the existing framework of law and policy (flawed or
otherwise). The NGOs and social activists, on the other hand, are in the game
of actually changing the very basis of the relations between community and
state (they have taken seriously Karl Marx’s admonition that the job of the sociologist
is to change the world, not just study it). But this is a long and hard path to
tread, as found by some of the DFID consultants (Hobley and Shields, 2000):
“However, it must be recognised that change is never easy, and that
the main delivery agency requires space to make adjustments, not just to
processes, but also to attitudes. Change is slowed down by ‘undue’ and heavy
pressure from external bodies and by myriad reviews, audits, evaluations all of
which demonstrate and show up serious problems in current practice. Without
space, without time to rebuild new processes and attitudes, and under pressure
to deliver, staff inevitably become defensive and practice returns to the old
process and attitude” (Hobley & Shields, 2000, p.8).
One of the limitations[3]
of the WGFP was its strategic choice of starting in just one pilot area, and
this happened to be North Canara (Uttara Kannada), a highly forested district
with relatively low population densities and a resource-rich forest
establishment as well as a highly privileged agricultural economy (under the
Canara privileges, valley-bottom agriculturists had 9 acres of hill forest or betta land to each acre of cultivated
land)[4].
This strategic decision put the following handicaps on mainstreaming of the
innovations from the start: a feeling in the rest of the department that the
conditions in Canara were so non-typical as to have low applicability in the
real world; a lack of sympathy, let alone ownership, in the rest of the department,
which may have contributed to a lurking interest in ‘showing up’ the Canara
innovations; a sense that the new planning systems were being driven by the
consultants (although they did try to maintain the stance that it was developed
seemingly by the local staff), and that these systems, though well presented,
seemed over-demanding and unnecessarily complicated; a feeling that the project
was being run by consultants, for consultants, and some of their local
hangers-on; a sense that DFID, in collusion with local NGOs who were out to
make their careers at the cost of the department, was trying to dictate policy
with a relatively small grant, akin to the tail trying to wag the dog (especially
in contrast to the much larger state-wide projects of other agencies, which came
without the pressure for drastic policy change); a sense that the project was
taking the FD away from the main mandate of improving the physical resource,
and taking up too much time of the staff in endless discussions, workshops,
training, and so on.
Further, by
continually revisiting abstract ideas like the ‘goal’ and ‘purpose’ of the
project (a problem inherent to the ‘logframe’ approach to project management),
there was a sense of over-analysis and filibustering. The high media attention
(mostly adverse) and publicity to the differences aired in the course of
periodic reviews and discussions gave the impression that there was a
large-scale mismanagement of the project.
The staff of the state
Auditor-General also jumped on the adversarial bandwagon, and most of their
objections amounted to the fact that actual operations did not adhere strictly
to the model-wise targets in the project document (which of course was the
result of the DFID treating these as only indicative, since actual operations
were to be decided village by village by the communities). The audit wanted
even the individual components to match the project document (e.g. different
plantation models, but also components like buildings, salaries, equipment,
etc.). On the other hand, DFID had pressed the point that even talking of
planting models (fuel/small timber, fruit, fodder, artisanal material, NTFP,
etc.) was against the philosophy of bottom-up, site-specific, community-level
planning. One result of this was that ultimately all the interventions were
being reported under the generalized head of miscellaneous plantations, so that
it became impossible to explain what exactly could be expected as a return to
the communities or the state from all this investment.[5]
Ultimately, the DFID decided
to make a far from satisfactory exit at the end of the (extended) project
period, and the second phase of the WGFP, which had been under discussion, was
abandoned. All this gave a bad name to the project, to the FD and DFID, and to
JFM itself. This experience, as far as the main implementers was concerned,
points to the general need to have a well-thought out, mutually validating,
exit policy, that does not leave an impression that things have gone horribly
wrong. The extreme intellectualism of the DFID consultants, combined with the
sense among the NGOs that they could strike at the implementing state agency
with lethal effect, combined to negate all the sincere effort that had gone
into both the physical and institutional aspects of the project, and in effect
succeeded in snatching a humiliating failure from the jaws of success.
This unhappy exit also
emphasized the inadequate time spans in the donor agencies’ approach, compared
to the long-term commitment that is really required for such changes to be
tested and take root on the ground. The project also shows the difficulty that
implementing agencies have in responding to the periodic changes that take
place in donor theories.[6]
This is a factor that should obviously be kept in mind when taking up pilot
projects in the ‘landscape’ mode now.
[2] See one such example of a new Forest
Management Planning Handbook at: https://f583e02d44080dfb51bc580772467c02fbfe89e0.googledrive.com/host/0B5kizcQrKucOVXdHb2FGc0g4aGM/western-ghats-forestry-project.pdf,
accessed December 2014
[3] Unlike the social environmentalists’
viewpoint and the donor agency/ consultants’ analysis, the Karnataka forest
department’s (KFD’s) viewpoint has seemingly not been properly articulated. This
will probably be the topic for a future paper by the author.
[4] The main product of
these valley bottom ‘gardens’ is the areca nut, a mildly narcotic alkaloid
product that is chewed assiduously by itself, or with the betel leaf, or
impregnated with tobacco, all over south and southeast Asia, to the grief (as
in the case of tobacco and beedis) of the users’ teeth and health.
[5] This is related to the
‘legibility’ concern of governing bodies when they take up interventions
(Scott, 1999).
[6] It appears that the
international donor community changes tack every decade or so: in forestry,
from business models at one time, to financial efficiency (well illustrated by
the National Commission on Agriculture, 1976), followed by massive industrial
forest plantations sponsored by the World Bank in the 1970s (see Barnes et al.,
1982); then Social Forestry as a panacea in the 1980s; then to community
forestry, participatory approaches, during the 1990s; then to empowerment and
transfer of ownership to communities and withdrawal of support to the agencies
of the state in the 2000s (witness the writings on democratization of forest
governance, as laid out in Lele & Menon, 2014); and now the holistic,
all-embracing view of the landscape approach. Since the actual cycle of each
approach seems to have been around a decade, the implementers are always at the
receiving end of the critical backlash at the end of the project cycle of 10
years.
(A pdf file of the entire article is available at https://www.academia.edu/21490696/Forest_Landscape_Restoration_in_India_Antecedents_experience_and_prognoses)
References
Barnes, Douglas F.,
Julia C.Allen, William Ramsay. April 1982. Social Forestry in Developing
Nations. (Unpublished). The Centre for Energy
Policy Research. Resources For the Future, Washington, D.C. April 1982.
Available at pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNAAY447.pdf
Dilip
Kumar, P.J. 2014. Managing India’s
Forests: Village Communities, Panchayati Raj Institutions and the State.
Monograph No.32. Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. Available
at http://www.academia.edu/9235210/Managing_India_s_Forests_Village_Communities_Panchayati_Raj_Institutions_and_the_State
Hobley,
Mary and Dermot Shields. 2000. The
Reality of Trying to Transform Structures and Processes: Forestry in Rural
Livelihoods. Working paper 132, February 2000. Overseas Development
Institute (ODI), London. Available at http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/2742.pdf
Lele,
Sharachchandra. 2003. Participatory Forest management in Karnataka: At the
Crossroads. Community Forestry,
Vol.2, Issue 4, May 2003, p.4-11. Available at: http://www.ces.iisc.ernet.in/biodiversity/sahyadri_enews/newsletter/issue21/pdfs/PFM%20in%20Karnataka.pdf
Lele, Sharachchandra and Ajit Menon. 2014. Democratizing Forest Governance in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Lele, Sharachchandra and Ajit Menon. 2014. Democratizing Forest Governance in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Nadkarni,
M.V., with S.A.Pasha and L.S.Prabhakar. 1989. The Political Economy of Forest Use
and Management. Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore New Delhi and London
NCA.
1976. Report of the National Commission
on Agriculture. Part IX, Forestry. National Commission on Agriculture.
Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, Government of India, New Delhi.
(Available at http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/bitstream/1/2041449/1/CCS323.pdf)
Scott,
James C. 1999.Seeing Like a State. How
Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University
Press.
Shyamsunder, S. and S.Parameshwarappa. 2014. Forest Conservation Concerns in India.
Bio-Green Books. (Review by Ullas karanth, available at http://www.deccanherald.com/content/438364/forests-india-balancing-ecological-human.html)
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