Killing the inheritors of the earth

Prior to the intervention of the Muslims in northern India which drove many of the Rajput clans to the wilderness of Central India, Gondwana was inhabited largely by the Gonds who lived both in the plains and in the hills. When Akbar conquered Central India, established Burhanpur as his provincial capital and brought the Deccan under his rule that there was large scale immigration, especially of the Hindus from the north and the west.

Forsyth writes, ‘‘The open country, under the rule of Akbar, was rapidly reclaimed by Hindu immigrants, arriving simultaneously from the north and from the west… The Gonds retired to the higher plateaus and slopes of the central hills, where their hunting instincts, and rude system of raising the coarse grains on which they subsist, could still find scope.’’

The fall of the Mughal Empire saw the rise of the Maratha power which overran Gondwana.The Marathas and the Pindaris between them laid waste to the countryside. This anarchy was ended only in 1818, when the British defeated the Marathas and law and order returned to the hills.

In 1861 the Central Provinces were constituted as a unit of administration under a Chief Commissioner and Sir Richard Temple was the first occupant of this post. He extensively toured the region of the Satpuras and found to his horror that unscrupulous contractors had already more or less taken over the forests and were felling them for the purpose of timber, especially railway sleepers. In particular Sir Richard Temple looked upon the region because of, “…its great capabilities for the storage of precious water…” He was thus the first person to understand the importance of these forests as protectors of the Great Central Indian Watershed.

When British rule was extended into this region,land as an asset began to have value, both because the British promised security of tenure and because the land revenue was both certain and moderate. There began a race for occupation of unoccupied land with the objective of claiming title to it. On the one hand the contractors were busy decimating the forests, with no check on them because the forests were no man’s land and on the other there was the pressure of settlers trying to occupy more and more culturable waste land.

It is under these circumstances that a settlement was made whereby those who could prove any type of title over the land had it recorded in their name, the hill chiefs were given full ownership over the hill forests in their possession and the rest of the forests were declared to be government property.This is the genesis of reservation of forests. Unlike what is claimed by the activists NGOs and certain other vested interest groups, reservation of the forests was done not to deprive the people of their rights but to protect the forests from absolute, wholesale destruction.No wiser move was ever made than this.

In the interregnum between the forests coming under protection and the period when they were without a master,especially from the date on which the survey was commenced and a cut off date was announced, almost all the teak from the northern part of the Central Province disappeared.

In my opinion this book, The Highlands of Central India, should be mandatory reading for everyone in this country because it contains wisdom relating to our forests never recorded before and not equalled thereafter. I have referred to it at some length because it is true that injustice was done to both the forests and to the tribals, but in a completely different way from what is being projected by the supporters of the Bill under discussion. The tribals were deprived of their land in the valleys and on the plateaus in the sixteenth century and thereafter. They were not deprived of forest land as is being touted.If justice is to be done to the tribals it is not two and a half hectares per person of reserved forest land which must be allotted.It must be two and a half hectares of cultivated land in the valleys which must be taken away from the present bhoomiswamis and made over to the tribals.

Incidentally, what happened in the nineteenth century was repeated in the twentieth century when under the Abolition of Proprietary Rights Act, MP abolished Malguzari. This is not like the zamindari of the permanent settlement areas and more akin to lambardari in the ryotwari areas of the Punjab.One of the main functions of the malguzar was to protect the village commons, including village forests. With the abolition of malguzari the village commons, but especially the village forests which were recorded in our land records became almost without a master because the malguzar no longer protected them and the villagers and the former malguzars felt free to help themselves to all that grew on this land. It is only in 1961 that forests were notified as protected forests and brought under the Forest Department, but in the intervening decade MP lost forty lakh hectares of village forests, including twenty eight lakh hectares by outright encroachment. At the time of independence undivided MP had 1,95000 square kilometers under forest. Today that area has shrunk in MP and Chhattisgarh combined to one lakh thirty five thousand square kilometers. In other words,MP has lost sixty thousand square kilometers of forest.

To be continued

The writer is chairman, National Centre for Human Settlement and Environment, Bhopal

PART II