Tribal Policy: Pulling Back from the Brink?

There is firstly the issue of genuine devolution of financial resources to tribal gram sabhas. We have already noted that the TSP strategy has led only to formal devolution to tribal areas. Impoverished tribal communities have no surplus that can be invested in development plans. Development planning by tribal gram sabhas can become a reality only if the TSP strategy is modified to ensure genuine devolution of substantial budgetary resources as united funds for tribal gram sabhas. The foundations for the groundswell of popular participation in people’s planning by gram sabhas in Kerala were first laid by the unprecedented decision of the state government to earmark 40 per cent of the state budget for local plans.

The Kerala model also underlines the importance of building capacities and competencies. In Kerala, this was done through a large movement for citizen’s education involving thousands of volunteers. For tribal communities, the challenge of disseminating the skills for people’s planning is even more formidable, because the institutions, procedures and the entire idiom of these processes of governance are so profoundly alien for a peoples historically excluded and oppressed by these institutions and processes. The same problems would apply to provisions in the law, which subordinate government functionaries like teachers and health workers to the gram sabha.

Minimalistic Interpretation - Example of MFPs

The implementation of the law has been severely hampered by the reluctance of most state governments to make laws and rules that conform to the spirit of the law. Weak-kneed political will has usually led to lack of bureaucratic creativity in the minimalistic interpretations of the law.

Bureaucratic subversion of the letter and spirit of the law has been most visible in the interpretation of that provision of PESA by which panchayats at appropriate levels and the gram sabha have been vested with the ownership of minor forest produce (MFP). For tribal forest dwellers, the forest department has been the most visible oppression.²² Enforcement of PESA is perceived as weakening the stranglehold of the forest department, and it is instructive to study the interpretation of PESA favoured by the forest department for its attempts to minimise the department’s loss of the control.

Firstly, the forest department states that the power of gram sabhas can extend only to forest located within the revenue boundaries of a village. This one provision, if accepted, would nullify the law because no reserved forest, and in most states, no protected forest is located within a revenue village. The spirit of the law is clearly to extend ownership to the gram sabha to MFP from forests located in the vicinity of the village, which they traditionally access. In fact, in the case of Joint Forest Management (JFM), the Madhya Pradesh government vested the village forest committees with the authority to manage forest falling within a radius of five kilometres of the boundaries of the village. A similar dispensation would be eminently suitable in the case of PESA.

Secondly, MFP has been defined to exclude cane and bamboo. This is contrary to the botanical definition of MFP, which is ‘that part of a tree that can be sustainably harvested without damage to the survival of the tree’. More significantly, it denies access to poor tribal artisans to two types of MFP on which their livelihoods are most critically dependent. On the other hand, we have already observed how State policy has subsidised bamboo to the extent that these are supplied at 1 to 5 per cent of their market rate for private industry.

However, the greatest semantic contortions are reserved for the forest department’s interpretation of the concept of `ownership’ of MP by the gram sabha. It is stated that ownership does not provide gram sabha with the right to take any decisions related to stewardship, management or sustainable harvesting of MFPs. Contrary to a whole body of empirical evidence from the national and international experience of JFM and community control of forests, it is claimed that the exercise of `ownership’ of MFPs by gram sabhas in this sense, would inevitably lead to a destruction of forests. Therefore, `ownership as provided for in PESA is reinterpreted to mean the right to net revenues from MFP, after retaining administrative expenses of the forest department.

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