Sustainability of forest management comes through community participation at all levels of intervention from planning, intervention and monitoring. There should be a bottom-up approach in microplanning, which requires mobilization of the community to participate in all forestry related interventions and also continuous monitoring.

Sustainable forest management has become the necessity for any country to mitigate the environmental consequences and address the local concern. It has been an established fact that the sustainable development can be achieved through sustainable forest management. This country report is an attempt to compile and analyse the relevant data of the country on criteria and indicators of Bhopal-India process, which has semblance with the national working plan code and also with the C&I of ITTO process.

The Indian Institute of Forest Management has taken up a ITTO sponsored project on operationalisation of sustainable forestry development with community participation (following the C&I approach) in eight forest divisions in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. This document is a pioneer attempt to workout sustainability index based on indicators of forest management units of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states.