Land and Forest Policy: Resources for Development or Our Natural Resources?
Land and forest resources have been at the centre of several policy interventions in India over a long period of time: policy declarations, acts and rules as well as incentivising and restraining tax and subsidy structures. Field reality observed by socia
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Land and Forest Policy: Resources for Development or Our Natural Resources?
2.1 The Issue Land, water and forests dominate the range of natural resources significant in India’s development. These resources have also been at the centre of several policy interventions: policy declarations, acts and rules as well as incentivising and restraining tax and subsidy structures. Simultaneously, there exists a plethora of literature on the nature of the use of these resources emerging from the social and the natural sciences. Field reality observed by social scientists and their natural science counterparts has been documented extensively in the last three to four decades. In the last few decades, non-governmental organisations in the development sector have also contributed significantly to the understanding from the grassroots on issues related to these sectors. The questions we ask here in this chapter are: Has the policy direction been impacted by the understandings from this literature? What is the empirical learning policy link? Who are the stakeholders and intermediaries who count?
2.2 T he Legacy: Centrally Governed Forest Land and Privileged Private Land Land, when viewed in the official agricultural statistics of India, is divided into several classes. These categories are net sown area, current fallows, fallows other than current, cultivable waste, pastures and other grazing lands, barren and uncultivable land, area put to nonagricultural use and forests. They relate mainly to the use to which land is being put, with net sown area or agricultural land and forest land constituting the larger part of the geographical area. One could reclassify the geographical land area in the country from the perspective of rights over it, with a more nuanced perception of rights. Land can be thought of as (a) privately owned mainly agricultural land; (b) forest land which is mainly government owned; (c) common © The Author(s) 2017 K. Chopra, Development and Environmental Policy in India, SpringerBriefs in Economics, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3761-0_2
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2 Land and Forest Policy: Resources for Development or Our Natural Resources?
land which may be pastureland, village land or fallow, both current and other than current; and (d) privately cultivated land within forests. Further, when we distinguish between ownership rights and user rights, the cross classification between the official categories and the property rights-based categories is closer to the field reality. Community user rights over even privately owned land left fallow (current fallows) may exist. The same is true for government-owned forests which allow grazing rights and even limited fuel collection rights to local communities. This spectrum of rights allows for increases in consumption and welfare of the communities outside of the income generation from privately owned land. The details have been recorded extensively in the literature. In the policy narratives since independence or even before it, two categories in the above classification dominate: fore
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