177

Forest Management as Regional Governance:
an Experience in India
Koichi KIMOTO
Hiroshima Jogakuin University,
4-13-1, Ushita-higashi, Higashi-ku, Hiroshima, 732-0063, Japane-mail: kx.7.koichi@gmail.com

Abstract
Since the 1980s, many types of community-based forest management (CBFM) systems have spreadthroughout the world. In India, joint forest management (JFM) was launched in the 1990s in several states asa form of CBFM. Under this program, ‘jointness’ is crucial to success. Many studies have investigated therelationship between the local people and authorities such as the Forest Department, NGOs and urban citizens; and researchers have studied village social structure such as how committees are constituted and thebalance of genders and generations. Regions, including forests, however, are not static entities and weredeveloped historically. They were settled not only at the village scale, but also at the scale of multiple villages.
Nagarahole National Park (NNP) was part of a dense forest. Since the 19th century, the forest has been developed and various migrant peoples have come to settle the forest region. After NNP was established, it was expected that the forest would be maintained under suitable management as a protected area for its biodiversity
and rich flora. What happened, though, was a donut-shaped region around NNP came to be settled withdiverse communities. We have to pay attention to the regional structure when pursuing feasibility of forest
management systems.
Key words: joint forest management, Karnataka, Nagarahole National Park, region, Western Ghats, India

1. Introduction
Since the 1980s, a new ‘methodology’ of forest management, namely community-based forest management(CBFM), has been introduced in many parts of the world(Berkes, 2007). In many cases, it was welcomed asheralding an end to the existent forest management,
which had continued long since the colonial era. In India,
subsequent to the social forestry program of the 1980s,
joint forest management (JFM) was introduced in manystates in the 1990s. There had been continued hopes foran end to resource-consuming forestry since the 19th
century. The authorities involved have had high praise forthe results, emphasizing the recovery of the forest-coverratio from 10% in the 1980s to 20%, the same level as theearly 20th century.
Ever since JFM was first introduced, discussions
revolving around it have consistently focused oncommunity-related issues. Common arguments in these
discussions have involved homogeneity and/or heterogeneity that can be seen in the social structure of thecommunity, and the possibility of collective action. Many
studies have shed light on institutional frameworks bywhich individuals or groups in communities are associated with the whole, and it has become clear that the
Global Environmental Research
18/2014: 177-182
printed in Japan

characteristics of ‘joint’ action depend on those of thecommunity as collective action. Community structures
should be studied prior to investigating the relationshipbetween humans and nature, governments and people,
and urban and local.
In this paper, based on fieldwork (2007–2012), I examine the possibility of ‘jointness’ in a forested region,
focusing on intra-relationships rather than inner-relationships, among the various communities in the forested
region, in which each has had a historical presence. In
this context, it is important that the region occupied bycommunities has its own scale, and consists not of asingle community but various communities. When we
discuss forest management, the scale of the region
becomes important in two respects: the scale of forest
itself is overwhelmingly larger than the scale of individual communities; and the scale of region consists ofvarious communities, and is considered the scale of forest(Chamberlin, 1974; Agrawal, 2000; Agrawal & Goyal,
2001; Karanth et al., 2006; Nagendra, 2011).

2. Nagarahole National Park
Nagarahole National Park (NNP) is located in thesouthwestern part of Karnataka, and is part of the©2014 AIRIES178

K. KIMOTO

Western Ghats range, which was registered as a World
Heritage Site in 2012. NNP, the average altitude of whichis around 800 m, stretches between the Cauvery Kabinirivers. The monthly mean air temperature ranges from
14°C to 33°C. The average annual precipitation is a little
less than 1,500 mm. NNP is part of the semi-arid area ofthe southern Deccan Plateau. NNP occupies two districts,
Mysore district (Hunsur and H.D. Kote taluk) andKodagu district (formerly Coorg). Before the reorganization of 1956, Mysore district belonged to the Mysore
Princely State and Kodagu district to the Coorg Kingdom,which were under British rule. Mysore has a unique
history of having had a wildlife preservation policy. The
Maharaja established a hunting preserve, referring to the
British at the beginning of the 20th century. After
independence, he assumed the role of the first chairmanof the India Wildlife Commission. On the other hand, in
Coorg, the Forest Department encouraged the tribal
people to develop swidden farms (kumri). After thenatural forest was logged, teak plantations were established by the British owners and in the teak plantations,coffee was grown. As a result, mixed plantations of coffee, pepper and teak expanded. The owners of theplantations employed tribal people as laborers, and they
resettled and cultivated paddy (Ambinakudige, 2011;
Abraham et al., 2013). In the Western Ghats, with the
exception of the wildlife sanctuary and plantations, theremaining natural forest was logged for railroad sleepers.

Even after independence, under the national five-yearplans, the amount of logging continued to increase forpromoting domestic industry and increased food production. The area of the current NNP soon became a wildlife
sanctuary (1955, 284.16 km2). It has since expanded
twice, later being promoted to national park in 1983.
Because of this historical condition, NNP became a target
area for important national projects such as Project Tiger(1983) and the India Eco-Development (IDE) project(1998) (Rangarajan, 2006).

3. Birth of the Forest Region
Figure 1 shows a comparison of the vegetation in the
1930s and at present. There have been no changes invegetation on the Coorg side (western part of NNP), in
which the plantations had spread by the 1930s. By contrast, on the Mysore side (eastern part of NNP), the forest
decline has been remarkable, and the boundaries of actual
vegetation almost coincide with those of the nationalpark nowadays.
From a long-term, abstract perspective it would beproper to consider the cause of the deforestation to be
population pressure. When trying to find prospects ofsome kind of solution for this, however, a more specificand multi-sided analysis is needed. First, the influence ofurbanization is considered (Table 1). Expansion of thecity’s suburbs occurred due to population growth. Indeed,

Fig. 1 Nagatahole National Park and deforested areas (1930 – present).

Forest Management as Regional Governance

179

Table 1 Urban population in Mysore district.
MysoreHunsur
H.D.Kote

class
I

1901
68,111

1911
71,306

1921
83,951

1931
107,1421941
150,540

1951
244,323

1961
253,865

1971
355,685

1981
441,754

1991
606,755

2001
755,3792011
893,062

a
b

100

104.7
105

117.7
123

127.6
157

140.5
221

162.3
359

103.9
373

140.1
522

124.2
649

137.4
891

124.5
1,109

118.2
1,311

III

6,673

4,772

4,463

6,777

7,919

12,62014,39319,996

27,72734,75343,90050,865

a
b

100

71.5
72

93.5
67

151.8
102

116.9
119

159.4
189

114.0
216

138.9
300

138.7
416

125.3
521

126.3
658

115.9
762

V

1,298

1,346

1,242

1,250

1,474

1,861

2,858

4,392

6,153

nd

12,045

14,313

100

103.7
104

92.3
96

100.6
96

117.9
114

126.3
143

153.6
220

153.7
338

140.1
474

---

-928

118.8
1,103

a
b

Census of India 1981, Series - 9, District Census Handbook, Mysore district, p.268
Note: a (year-on-year rate), b (the level in 1901 as a base of 100)an increase in urban population has been seen in thisregion, but even in Mysore, the main city of this region,
this tendency became remarkable only in recent decades(Arun Das & Kimoto, 2009). The same applies to thecase of Hunsur and H.D. Kote, secondary cities in thisregion. In the case of Hunsur, a decrease in population
was seen before and after the Partition of India, whentimber production declined.
Figure 2 shows the distribution of settlements in the
1950s in the Hunsur and H.D. Kote districts, produced
using 1961 census data. Most of these ‘revenue villages’
had some population in the 1950s. In general, during that
period the population of each village was apt to be
increasing.
Many of the inhabitants came from other parts ofsouthwest Karnataka, which is a semi-arid region. In ahistorical context, before irrigation canal projects were
undertaken and the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam completed in
the 1930s, rainfed farming dominated. Because thepopulation capacity of south Karnataka was low, many
people migrated spontaneously to forest lands. Most ofthese new settlements have names related to their native
village or place. Of course, serious famines and epidemics, which occurred frequently from the end of the 19th
century, were also important reasons for migrations.
By the 1980s, the trend of settlements filling up
uninhabited areas and populations increasing in existingvillages had calmed down, but there was a new ‘inducement’ trend, in which most migrants were being recruitedby the state government under poverty policies to settle
land under relatively poor conditions. The new settlements were called ‘colonies,’ and were established on‘wastelands’ inside existing revenue villages. Many
migrants to these colonies came from more remote areas,
namely other states and districts.
Residents of the village of Mallahali (‘pp’ in Fig. 2)
are farmers from Erode district in Tamil Nadu State. The
land of this village had remained unsettled because of bad
drainage condition around ponds, but these people
thought it was not so bad for cultivating turmeric.
Recently, with demand for turmeric increasing, one civilengineer came back to the village with an idea of shifting
to export-oriented cultivation for the market of Erode,which is one of the largest markets for turmeric in South
India. The village of Karigala (‘qq’ in Fig. 2) consists offishermen who came from Kannur on the coast of

Fig. 2 Distribution of villages in Hunsur and H.D. Kote Talukby revenue.

Karnataka under the poverty policies of the 1970s.
Initially, they engaged in fishing in ponds and the Kabini
River, but finally had to give it up and are now returningas seasonal workers to fish in their native village ofKannur.
The residents of the colonies are not only from outside the forest area, but also from within the forest. During the 1970s, many colonies were widely distributed in
the outer fringes of the forest in the Hunsur, H. D. Koteand Mysore districts, populated by tribal people, the Junu
Kuruba and Soligaru, who had long lived in the forestand had cultural traditions there. Currently, there aremany generations who have no experience in the forest
and no interest in forest matters. For example, in thevillage of Yashodarapura (‘rr’ in Fig. 2) located on the180

K. KIMOTO

west side of Hunsur, most villagers work in Hunsur andMysore. In this village, JFM was provided under theguidance of the State Forest Department, but the villagers
are not very interested in the program because the carework is complicated and provides no income in the shortterm.

4. The Case of Settlements
I have been using the word ‘village’ without defining
it until now, but as shown in Fig. 2, most of these‘villages’ were present before the residents were present.
These settlements are the so-called ‘revenue villages,’which are villages that were established solely for the
purpose of tax collection by the British government. The
Reserved Forest, one category configured in the Forest
Act of 1927, is, in fact, reserved for ‘any’ purpose. The
Forest Department expects income from increasing timber production, the Treasuries Department from thesettlement of able farmers, and after Independence, thesettlement of farmers came to increase food production
and revenue. In this context, it can be said there is a direction in which all stakeholders can come to a consensus
and be satisfied. The forest has been converted to cultivated land, not as natural vegetation, but as cultivable‘wastelands’ (Saigel, 2011; Singh, 2013).

The village of Metikuppe, located between H.D. Koteand Hunsur, was settled by charcoal burners who emigrated from Mandya district for filling demand from theplantations in Coorg State at the beginning of the 20th
century (Fig. 3). These villagers keep relationships, suchas marital status, with the mother villages in Mandya
district, which became famous as an area with highagricultural productivity in sugarcane through the development of canal irrigation in the 1970s. In the 1980s,
the population of the village rapidly increased through an
influx of migrants from the mother villages. They introduced a manner of cultivating sugar cane by pumping
groundwater, and some villagers tried new farming techniques in addition to the old dry farming of Ragi and
Jowar. At that time, the forest, which remained in theborder region between villages, namely ‘wastelands’ of
the revenue village, was clear-cut and converted toagricultural land. At the same time, a ‘colony’ wasestablished in the wastelands inside the State Forest, i.e,the Reserved Forest managed by the State Forest
Department. This development of wastelands on bothsides, in the village and State Forest, resulted in a ‘joint
village’ consisting of Mettikuppe and the Mettikuppe
colony. These two villages have the same name, but there
is no social relationship between the two.

Fig. 3 The Metikuppe village and colony.

Forest Management as Regional Governance

5. Arrival of the National ParkThe national park system arrived in India in the 1980s.
National parks are protected at multiple levels by various
policies such as IED and Project Tiger. The boundary of
the NNP was drawn on the Reserved Forest in the strict
sense (Martin & Lemon, 2001). Because of this situation,
the forest was divided in two parts, the Protected Area(national park) and the remainder in revenue villages(Fig. 3). The forest in the latter part came to be clearlyrecognized as ‘wastelands for public use.’ In that decade,the division between the national park and its adjacentareas was reinforced by an electric fence and trench forresolution of Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) issues(Rangarajan, 2003; Kimoto, 2010).
On the other hand, exploitation of the rest of thewastelands by the Forest Department could still be seen.
In the 1990s, re-habilitation villages were established inthis gap under the IED project (Assadi, 1996; Mahnty,
2002a). ‘Scheduled Tribe’ people were scheduled tomove into plots prepared by the Forest Department as an
optional ‘voluntary relocation’ (Hiremath et al, 1997;
Karanth, 2002; Guha, 2003; Desai & Bhargav, 2010).
The Forest Department cut the trees in preparation forthis project by ‘lawful’ means (Karanth, 2007). This
clear- cutting project had the goal of meeting demands
for fuel wood for drying tobacco leaves, which gained
attention as a crop inimical to elephants.
The establishment of NNP resulted in the eliminationof the buffer zone between the farmland and forest.
Along the boundary of the national park the residences of
the Scheduled Tribes formed a ring. Most of them did notcultivate the agricultural farmland assigned to them by
the Forest Department, because the land was not enoughfor their livelihood and they did not know how to care forthe plants. They have continued going to plantations on
the Kodagu side seasonally, the same as before. Much of
the farmland allocated to them was equally ‘loaned’ tonon-Scheduled-Tribe farmers, and as a result, the conversion of forests to farmland was accelerated.

6. Discussion
For CBFM, it goes without saying that co-operationof local communities and jointness with authorities isessential. Many studies have attempted to discuss therelationship between local communities and various
agencies, urban residents, NGOs and internationalorganizations (Potter, 1996; Mahanty, 2002b). But, who
are the people of local community? Where is ‘local’?
I have discussed the regional conditions around theforest. The forested region, including NNP, can bedivided into three parts. The first is inside the nationalpark. This part was supposed to be a range for strict
protection under the control of the Forest Department.
The second is the peripheral area around the nationalpark in a ring shape. It is difficult to determine the extent
exactly, but in this area the final cutting is being carriedout in the wastelands. The residents in this area include

181

the Scheduled Tribes who have been cut off from theirrelationship to the forest, and the farmers who have neverknown the forest. This area is the most crucial region forafforestation and/or conservation and for solving humanwildlife conflicts, especially with elephants. In somecases, tribal people who live in this region are employedby the Forest Department under forest-related policies,
but it is not an equal relationship like that expressed using
the word ‘joint.’ It can be said that the possibility ofbuilding a ‘joint’ relationship between them is very small.
The third one is the region extending outward fromthe ring region. As shown above, in the historical context,
this region was a de-deforested area. In some cases, theresidents living in this area are looked upon as ‘criminal,’
but most of these residents have emigrated here only
since the forest was lost. In the latter case, no one realizes
that this region was once a forest; much less do they haveany feeling that they might become persons connectedwith forest management. Even if some individuals felt so
inclined, in the current situation, with the original differences among these villages being as they are, it is very
difficult to count on the possibility of governance over abroad range in this region.
In the prescriptive sense, local residents should ‘join
together’ and actually there is a possibility of this. It is up
to us, however, to start a study on the region itself, while
paying attention to the variety in the region and whether
the scale conforms to the scale of the forest as the objective. In this paper, we can see the gap between the management of the national park and the dis-management
outside the national park. We have to investigate thestructure of forest ‘region,’ not only the forest.

Acknowledgements
I thank S. Arun Das (University of Mysore) and R.B.
Singh (Delhi University) for their warm support. I also
thank Vishwanatha, R. for his assistance with fieldwork.
This research was funded by KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid
for Scientific Research) (25300044 (B)) and (21222003(S)) of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS).
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Koichi KIMOTO
Dr. Koichi KIMOTO is a professor of the Department of Liberal Arts at Hiroshima Jogakuin
University and a member of the steering committee of the International Geographers Union on
Land Use Cover and Change (IGU/LUCC),
2012–2016. He is interested in the regional
context of national resource management forcomparison. His main countries of interest are India, Indonesia, Scotland,
China and Kenya.

(Received 14 July 2014, Accepted 27 November 2014)