Strengthening communities by protecting commons

While there are several success stories of villagers planting more trees on their land and taking good care of them, the situation becomes different when it is a question of mobilizing people for regeneration of community and common land, including degraded forest land and village pastures. Now it is a question of working for the common good of the entire village or at least a substantial section of the village. While India’s villages have a rich tradition of this, these traditional strengths have been eroded due to a number of factors, in the wake of the bigger setback to community-based protective systems inflicted during colonial times.

Thus while the potential for reviving community protective systems exists, it needs sustained, continuing and thoughtful efforts with the cooperation of local people on the one hand and voluntary organizations and government agencies on the other hand. Where such close cooperation over a number of years can be sustained and efforts continue to be made despite initial setbacks, the results achieved can be very impressive and heartwarming. Once the community spirit for protective efforts of common good has been created, this continues to find many creative outlets for realization of beautiful results in many aspects of rural life. On the one hand the success of regeneration of degraded land and planting of trees, bamboo and grass is itself very beneficial, on the other hand the revival of community actions and creativity can also lead to other important gains, including unexpected ones in social reform.

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This potential of community strengths has been well realized in Rajasthan in the efforts of a leading voluntary organization, Seva Mandir, particularly in its work in the villages of Udaipur district. While these villages have substantial populations of tribal communities, people from other communities also contributed to these efforts. Seva Mandir was awarded the 2023 Global Elinor Ostrom Award for Collective Governance of the Commons. Several members of the rural teams involved in these efforts have also received awards and other recognition of their efforts. In a review of these efforts spread over several decades, two senior members of the Seva Mandir team who have contributed a lot to these efforts, Narendra Jain and Ronak Shah, have written, “With Seva Mandir’s facilitation, local communities have protected, conserved and managed more than 15,000 hectares of common land.

Similarly, 18 sites of dev-van, bani or oran (sacred groves that are also common lands) have been redeveloped.” Creatively utilizing some provisions of the Forest Rights Act of 2006 like Community Forest Rights (CFR), this work could progress further. As this review adds, “At present, 296 CFR sites have been approved – this amounts to 38,514 hectares of forests. This is a remarkable achievement, thanks to the persistence and vision of village communities that made the commons the basis of just and sustainable development.” In another comment, Prof Suraj Jacob has stated that in the course of this work being taken forward several community members discovered hidden talents in the new creative and encouraging environments, and also started contributing with poems, songs and plays, sometimes themselves feeling surprised by the sudden flowering of their artistic potential.

Another important point made by Prof Jacob is that these social change processes and mobilizations involved a combination of struggle (sangharsh) and constructive work (nirman). When there was need for opposing unhelpful attitudes of government officials and influential, powerful persons who had encroached community land, there were struggles, but on the other hand in more normal times there was a lot of cooperation with the government in implementing some schemes with a special emphasis on those aspects which had potential for the welfare of people and protection of environment.

A very important contribution to the understanding of these significant achievements and social change processes has been made by another senior academic, Amrita Nandy, who has written profiles of several community-based activists and leaders who made an important contribution to this effort. These profiles reveal that several community leaders had risen from a background of extreme poverty and denial of school education, to overcome heavy odds and make important contributions, apart from improving their family’s condition and arranging for the proper school (and in some cases also college) education of their children. What is encouraging to learn from these profiles is that several of these activists including women activists were willing to take big risks to confront armed forest smugglers as well as powerful encroachers.

It is no less heartening to know that when activists from weaker sections including tribal communities were taking such risks, some villagers from higher castes including women also came to their help and shared the risks. Bajranglal Sharma, a former development administrator who has been very supportive towards these and other such efforts, says, “If village communities involved in sharing development responsibilities can overcome mutual conflicts to cooperate for the common good of the entire village, then this is good news and must be welcomed, even though the situation often cannot be an ideal one and some irritants always remain.” These and other such efforts in which ordinary villagers get new opportunities under which their hidden potential can flower in encouraging ways need to be expanded and taken forward.

(The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Saving Earth for Children, A Day in 2071 and Guardians of the HimalayasVimla and Sunderlal Bahuguna.)