Improving capacity of tribal communities for participatory management of Forests and for better livelihoods in Gadchiroli District

The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 popularly known as FRA 2006 is a landmark decision in empowerment of tribal communities in India. The two important provisions the act have is the Community Forest Rights (CFR) whereby the entire ownership and management of forest around the village/hamlet is given in the custody of Village Gram Sabha and secondly the landless and or those forest dwelling individuals/families who have been cultivating the encroached forest lands before 2005 are given the land for agriculture purpose to help them earn their livelihoods.

Taking advantage of the governments resolve to involve locales towards management of forest resource through recognition of community forest right, the project intends to use an area of people managed forest. Through this project the organization intends to take up actives in 2 villages only, that government has recognized right to more than 500 villages over their neighboring forests. Successful implementation of this project shall lead to large scale replication in other villages as well. It will be equally important to involve the government authority in the program me to ensure larges scale reliability.

There is a need to work on following programs and activities

i. Share the developed CMPs to all concerned departments through District Level Convergence Committee (A committee specially set up by State Government of Maharashtra as per the FRA Rules to help Gram Sabhas to access the funds from various line departments to implement CMP. The GR was passed in Oct 2016).

ii. Capacity building of Gram Sabhas and its executive committees formed under section 4 (1) e of FRA in understanding their roles and responsibilities in empowering communities.

iii. Management of CFR with technical expertise and back up.

iv. Livelihoods based on forest regeneration, agricultural intensification, water conservation, MFP based micro –enterprises and thus regenerate the biodiversity,

v. Empowering GS for trading local MFPs.

vi. Facilitate formation of BMCs and work on natural/organic farming, aforestation with strictly local tree / plant species and fisheries to regenerate natural habitation and biodiversity.

vii. Facilitate all processes towards sustaining the development and empowerment processes amongst tribal villages

• The project beneficiaries’ shall be aware of the provisions of the forest right act and the benefits and the responsibility bestowed upon them by the act. Hence there will be greater sense of responsibility in protection conservation and management of forest resource on which their livelihood is dependent
• The CFR areas grated to the villages shall have grated species diversity, the current forest blank will get reduced, and community shall offer protection to the areas and adopt controlled grazing and resource use regime
• Crop improvement program me and enrichment of backyard kitchen garden shall reduce dependency of local on forest for food and medicinal herbs there by reducing the pressure on forest and providing it with n opportunity to recoups to its original glory. This shall also ensure food and nutrition security to the local inhabitants
• Sustainable harvesting of NTFP under the management pan develop for the CFR Ares shall provide direct tangible economic benefit to the local inhabitants.
• As a result of convergence of government schemes like MGMRGA there will be increase in opportunity for wage earners to claim work under EGS for productive works for themselves and the community as well.