Disjointed and confused

joint Forest Management (jfm) is a laudable concept. However, before it can take on the multiple responsibilities that have been assigned to it, it must first resolve the severe identity crisis it is undergoing. Officially, jfm refers to cooperative agreements between village communities and the local forest department to protect a particular patch of (state-owned) forest land and share the final harvest. Since the government of India circular of June 1, 1990, 16 states have passed resolutions regarding the implementation of jfm and one estimate suggests that 10,000 to 15,000 village forest protection and management groups are currently protecting over 1.5 million ha of state forest land.

In practice, however, jfm refers to a cluster of phenomena rather than one easily identifiable process. Each state resolution has varying rules regarding the constitution of forest protection committees, their legal status, the kind of land they are given to protect, the shares involved, etc. Apart from this, differences in culture, ecology and in the organisational structure of the forest departments have introduced variations in actual practice. For instance, in Orissa, jfm might more accurately be called community forest protection, because the forest department plays only a marginal role, and villagers make their own rules about access and control. By contrast, in West Bengal the process has had much more direct forest department involvement, ever since forest officer A K Banerjee's experimental scheme in the Arabari Hills in the early '70s. The degree of