Over years, the government has weakened communities’ autonomy over forests. This has left them less inclined and able to help prevent and fight forest fires.
While the fires have brought into focus the immense vulnerability of the state’s forest lands, they have also shed light on another dimension of the problem: that local communities are far more involved in protecting forests in some areas than others.
The reason for the skew is not hard to discern. The forest department manages 26.5 lakh hectares of reserved forests, to which communities’ access is controlled, while more than 7 lakh hectares of the state’s forests are managed by van panchayats. These are village-level administration units that run in parallel to village panchayats and draw powers from the Van Panchayat Act of 1931, which granted them a high degree of autonomy in using and maintaining managing forests in their vicinity. These institutions are unique to Uttarakhand – currently, the state has more than 12,000 such van panchayats.
“Of course, forest fires do not understand boundaries between reserved forests or van panchayats,” said Mallika Virdi, a former sarpanch of Sirmoli Van Panchayat in Munsiyari. “But in places where communities have rights to manage their forests and have close dependence to the forests, people rush to extinguish fires immediately.” She added that “for reserved forests, since the forest department manages it through their employees, forest guards and rangers, communities do not feel that the forest belongs to them, and so they do not participate in extinguishing it.”