Bijnor: The rise in number of Van Gujjars, a pastoral tribe, who have made Amangarh Tiger Reserve (ATR) home is beginning to worry forest department here as they are putting pressure on both land and resources. Data collected during a three-month census that ended on Saturday shows 131 Van Gurjar …
Initially involved in adult education and health activities, Jawan Lal took it as a challenge to transform degraded lands to productive assets in Barwa village for about 110 families. Jawan Lal says, "Even we realised the importance of water and afforestation early, but people were not ready to join and …
Concerned over the water level in the region of Suarashtra which had receeded from 15 metres in 1990 to 120-210 metres in 1998, Mansukh Bhai Suvagia, a 37-year-old government servant decided to initiate steps to tackle the problem. With the help of villagers, he launched a Lok Fund scheme and …
Manna Singh, a farmer by profession is the chairman of Sitapur project in Madhya Pradesh. Couple of years back, 46-year-old Singh was sent as a district representative to Anna Hazare for getting trained. In the year 1996, Union ministry of rural development supported the Sitapur project with a financial aid …
Laxmi Narayan joshi, watershed committee chairman of Saipur village, has been a source of inspiration to the villagers. The watershed work started in 1998-99. Medbandi, a stone embankment built on the lower side of the agriculture field on a hill slope to conserve soil and moisture and help create a …
Ram Karan Bhadana, a Gujjar is not involved in sheep raring as others, but is committed towards the development of the village. He is a well-known activist for development works in the village with a population of 2,000-2,500. He was actively involved in creating awareness, giving importance to tree and …
Sixty-year-old Devendra is the president of the Kedar Village Tank Farmers Society in Tamil Nadu. The society was formed in 1989 and there are around 217 members working with it from 13 different communities. The society operates and irrigates an area of approximately 119 hectares. The Centre for Water Resources, …
A lot has been written on India's vast and ancient experience in rainwater harvesting. But no concrete effort has been made to use these traditional innovations. There is no village in India which cannot meet its drinking water needs if it adopts the kundi technology developed by the people of …
Past experiences have shown that centralized management of natural resources, based on a culture of exclusion and rules, has not contributed to the sustainable management of natural resources. This important realization has led to a series of policy changes in the recent past that provides an ever-widening democratic space to …
on May 8, 1999, the Rural Litigation & Entitlement Kendra ( rlek ), a Dehradun-based non-governmental organisation ( ngo), moved an application with the National Human Rights Commission ( nhrc), saying that the Uttar Pradesh ( up ) government is not complying with nhrc 's orders which had directed the …
THE concept of joint forest management JFM is based on the interaction of forest departments with local people. However, the interests of people and forest departments could at times be at variance, as in Salehpur, a Gujjar-dominated village in Haryana near the border with Himachal Pradesh. The Hill Resource Management …
This book outlines the first alternative management plan proposed for the protecte areas of India. It provides both a general mode of community forest management in protected areas, and specific proposals for implementation in the proposed Rajaji national park. It is based on the expertise of the Van Gujjars and …
THE conflict between people and the managers of national parks is growing in leaps and bounds. Van Gujjars, a nomadic tribe practising transhumance living in hilly northern Uttar Pradesh, were deprived of their winter headquarters in the forests of the Shivalik foot hills. This rather callous administrative step in the …
Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan has sent a missive to district administrations instructing them to register various communities which hitherto had been left out of electoral and census lists on account of their "nomadic practices". By mid-November, the first exercise under this programme bore fruit when nearly 15,000 Van …
AS PART of an unique attempt to educate nomads, when the restive Van Gujjars of Uttar Pradesh"s Dehra Dun and Saharanpur districts and Himachal Pradesh"s Sirmaur district move in summer to hill pastures near Shimla with their cattle, their teachers will tag along. Naya Safar (New Journey), a 3-part primer, …
The presence of Gujjars in the Rajaji National Park could be responsible for the significant increase in elephant numbers in the past four years, wildlife observers claim. According to them, the Gujjars have minimised poaching and regulated the monitoring of the elephant population in the park. The number of elephants …
WHEN GUJJAR Zahur Hussain got into a trifling argument with a forestry official who was on his way to a temple in the Rajaji National Park, little did he expect what followed. That evening the official -- a deputy director of the park -- came to Hussain's hut accompanied by …
ALL OVER the country, there are tensions around national parks and sanctuaries. People living in and around these forests see them as the last remaining sources of biomass and depend on them heavily to meet their fuel and fodder needs. Grazing and other regulations imposed by wildlife managers have cut …
GUJJARS are up in arms because they resent being thrown out of their homes by the proposed Rajaji National Park in Uttar Pradesh. In coastal Orissa, Chilika fisherfolk are protesting the allocation by the government of a slice of their environment to the House of Tata. What binds these disparate …
