Eco development ended in 2000
Mapudadhi offers fresh off-the-oven sweets when you reach her factory-cum-home. At M G R Thanganagar village in Tirunelvelli, she is not enjoying the fruits of her hard work alone. Other women gather, taste and narrate how they set up businesses with loans from their women's self help groups (SHGS). More than 540 SHGs and 182 village forest committees were created under the Forestry Research Education and Extension Project (FREEP) in the vicinity of Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve (KMTR). Today these institutions provide easy loans in villages at the reserve's periphery and help the poorest out of the clutches of the local moneylender. They do so well that they hire the services of the employees of NGOs that helped set up the forest committees in the first place to keep their accounts.
"Choosing the right livelihood option was painstaking. In the beginning we met as many people as we could for six months, asking what they wanted from the project. The first work under the project was done by pooling money from our own pockets as the money for the project was yet to arrive and we couldn't wait,' says Venkatesh, a former eco-development officer at KMTR. Such efforts paid off. Ten years later, the villages have a financial base of Rs 3.04 crore that revolves to create credit worth Rs 10.98 crore. People have chosen their own path to becoming rural entrepreneurs.
The effect on the forest has been salutary. Firewood collection by headloaders, once a major pressure, has dwindled. "Official records say by more than 90 per cent but I would say by about 60-80 per cent,' says a circumspect Venkatesh. "Now we have to work with them on fiscal responsibility and other such second generation issues,' says H Malleshappa, the new eco-development officer at KMTR. Development doesn't stop: eco-development, too, carries on beyond a project that ended in 2000.
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