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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Women are the guardians of the forest. So why does India ignore them in its policies? -Purabi Bose

Women are the guardians of the forest. So why does India ignore them in its policies? -Purabi Bose

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published Published on Apr 24, 2018   modified Modified on Apr 24, 2018
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It is important that forest policies are formulated through a gender-sensitive lens and that women are included in the conversation.

A few weeks ago, when Google India marked the 45th anniversary of the Chipko movement with a doodle, it was a refreshing flashback to forest communities sacrificing their lives to protect trees from being felled for timber use.

One of the first such recorded community protests was at Khejarli village in present-day Rajasthan. In this village, around the year 1730, about 300 Bishnois led by Amrita Devi are said to have sacrificed their lives to protect Khejri trees. The Bishnois, particularly the women in the community, considered Khejri trees (Prosopis cineraria) sacred because of their multi-use benefits. Amrita Devi, before she was beheaded with an axe bought inside the forest to cut trees, said: “Sar s?ntey r?kh rahe to bh? sasto j?n.” If a tree is saved even at the cost of one’s head, it’s worth it.

Two centuries later, in the 1970s, the Chipko movement across Uttar Pradesh shaped community forest management in India. Women were at the forefront of this movement too, as they hugged trees to protect them from felling by the timber industry.

The reality has not changed much, as is evident from the case of Kabiben Kalara, a member of the Bhil tribe from Rajasthan. In 2016, she was uprooted from her family farmland –which she was claiming under the Forest Rights Act – because of a road widening and upgrading project in Bagidora tehsil of Banswara district. “How many women have to be killed or displaced with their families and face violence before the government realises that forests and water should be protected?” she asked.

‘Wood is good’

A search for the words women and gender in the Draft National Forest Policy, 2018 – which governs the formulation of all laws and schemes related to forestry – returns zero results. While terms like wood, economic or timber appear all over the 10-page draft policy released by the Indian government in March.

“Why do women’s rights to forests…remain a secondary issue?” asked Sarita Katkar, a young Katkari Adivasi from Maharashtra. She belongs to particularly vulnerable tribal groups and believes that for the Forest Department, forests are all about wood. It fails to see the non-timber products which support the livelihoods of over 100 million people in India.

Indeed, in 2017, the ministry launched a “Wood is Good” campaign to promote timber for industrial or commercial use. It collected over Rs 50,000 crore through a Central Compensatory Afforestation Fund, which should have then been used for afforestation. Instead, the fund is being directed mainly towards building timber plantations in forests and private properties, often without the consent of households and gram sabhas.

Brinda Karat, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), voiced her concern. “[Typically] indigenous trees should be planted. And who knows best about that? Obviously it is tribal communities. But what is happening in all these [forest] areas is, plantations after plantations are being planted according to commercial interest. If you go to any of these new plantation areas, you will see Eucalyptus trees and trees that are useful for paper industries. The Compensatory Afforestation Fund is (a) giving the private corporate a say, (b) destroying the rights of tribal peoples under various legislations, and (c) destroying the conservation and biodiversity of the environment.”

“Many Adivasi women in our village cannot read and write, but they hold indigenous knowledge about every single tree – its use for household consumption, medicinal value, for livestock and for biodiversity,” said Sunita Kanko, a 30-year-old Munda Adivasi schoolteacher in a forested village in Jharkhand. “How can we comment on the draft policy if it is written in English just like in the days of British India? There is no effort by the environment ministry to translate it in other Indian languages. Our forest connects us culturally and spiritually with our ancestors, while policymakers and private companies think of wood as economic gain.”

Uday Mengal, a volunteer helping tribal communities claim their collective forest land rights, agreed. “We were one of the first countries to introduce historic legislation recognising the rights of indigenous peoples and traditional communities through the Forest Rights Act, 2006,” he said. “Ten years later, India has not yet fully implemented this legislation. Such failure has resulted in social movements like the farmer’s march we saw in Maharashtra.”

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Scroll.in, 23 April, 2018, https://scroll.in/magazine/875823/women-are-the-guardians-of-the-forest-so-why-does-india-ignore-them-in-its-policies


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