Land and Forest Policy: Resources for Development or Our Natural Resources?

Land and forest resources have been at the centre of several policy interventions in India over a long period of time: policy declarations, acts and rules as well as incentivising and restraining tax and subsidy structures. Field reality observed by social scientists and their natural science counterparts has also been documented extensively in the last three to four decades. The questions we ask in this chapter are: Has the policy direction been impacted by the understandings from this literature? What is the empirical learning policy link? Who are the stakeholders who count? We find that the legacy consisted of a focus on privately owned land and forests, to the utter neglect of common land. These resources were seen, in the main, as ‘for development’. An alternative, though partial, understanding of land- and water-based ecosystems led to some initiatives (such as watershed development and joint forest management) in the 1990s, haltingly and inefficiently implemented. This in turn gave the judiciary an overwhelming role. Similarly, a rights-based initiative got cognizance in the form of the Forests Rights Act, soon to be pushed to the background by the focus on ‘development’. In the context of land and forests, there continued and continues a constant to and fro between wise use and mindless extraction, with some stakeholders inevitably privileged due to the prevalent unequal distribution of knowledge, income and power.