Resistance: The First Step To Change

In 1986, an international agency provided two computers to Wildlife Wing of Odisha Forest Department — one for Simlipal Tiger Reserve and the other for Nandankanan Zoological Park. Computers were alien those days, particularly in Government system. The then-head of Wildlife Wing refused to unpack them;  “I will be retiring in a couple of months. I don’t know what is inside it. If something explodes or something goes wrong my pension will be held up. I don’t want to take any risk of facing audit objection. Let me retire peacefully, you may do whatever you want after that.”

I was both surprised and amused.

After seven years, in 1993, there was almost a rerun when I was posted as Associate Professor in Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy (IGNFA), Dehradun. I was in charge of the Computer Cell and conducted one-week training programmes for senior IFS officers. We allotted a computer to each participant and tried to make the training module hands-on and as simple as possible.

In the first training programme, I observed one very senior officer was very tense, as he sat doing nothing. He asked, “Tell me very clearly, suppose I press a button and something goes wrong, first, will I be held personally responsible? Second, can it cause any bodily damage to me”.

I convinced him that computers are very sturdy machines and nothing will happen unless he decides to do something like hitting the screen with a hammer.

I appreciated his apprehension and from the next training onwards, put a note on each table; “Computers are very robust and nothing will go wrong by any of your actions. We indemnify you in the unlikely event of anything going wrong.”

Once they overcame the initial phobia, they really enjoyed it. In fact, I was the one who enjoyed the most, which tempted me to take almost all the classes. I became a hero, although I just had rudimentary knowledge on the subject. My major job, I guess, was just to scotch the initial hesitations.

Odisha is a leader in Social Forestry and Participatory Forest Management (PFM). It launched a Social Forestry Project with support of the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), way back in early 1980s. This laid the foundation for taking forestry outside the boundaries of government forests and was acknowledged to be highly successful.

Later, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) supported a PFM Project, Odisha Forestry Sector Development Project (OFSDP), which commenced in June 2006. After its completion, JICA independently evaluated and rated it as their top-ranked project. As a consequence, they approved the phase-II of OFSDP in 2014, which is presently underway.

But I remember in the 1980s when people started talking of participatory management, major resistance came from many foresters cutting across ranks. Field foresters felt that their main job was policing, so how could they consider the common people as partners – those whom they considered as forest offenders. Even many senior forest officers were quite sceptical about the efficacy of this paradigm shift.

When I joined India Forest Service in 1982, forestry was primarily about timber management and then came other tangible outputs, which were clubbed under Minor Forest Produce (MFP). There was hardly any focus on intangible services. By the time I retired in 2019, I vigorously professed the prime role of natural forests was to (a) act as carbon sink, (b) conserve soil and moisture and (c) sustain livelihood of forest dependent communities; while timber could be produced as renewable resource from plantations and woodlands.

I think Dr Promode Kant was the first IFS officer who developed serious interest on carbon sequestration in forests as a climate change mitigation mechanism, after Rio Earth Summit in 1992. His interest got a further boost after adoption of Kyoto Protocol in 1997 that gave birth to the Clean Development Mechanism under which afforestation and reforestation were also included as important climate change mitigation tools. He did his PhD in 2002 on climate change and forestry, and wrote a number of papers on the topic. He worked with United Nations bodies and served as visiting Professor in University of Joensuu in Finland.

I first met him when he came to Bhubaneswar on invitation of OFSDP sometime in 2007 for a lecture on carbon sequestration by forests. Recognizing carbon sequestration to be the principal role of forests needed a huge shift. Most of the participants were not willing to accept his postulates and inferences; they had several questions like ‘Do you mean all the age-old Forest Management systems don’t have any scientific basis?’; ‘Would it mean there is no difference between the valuable timber species and ordinary ones?’; ‘How can forest soil store more carbon than the overground biomass?’

Conviction rate of offences booked under Forest Acts is negligible since prosecution generally fails to establish that the offence was committed inside a forest, due to poor demarcation of boundaries on field and non-availability of legally acceptable maps. In a landmark judgement on December 12, 1996, in Lafarge Umiam Mining case, Hon’ble Supreme Court categorically ordered to digitally map each plot of land that may be defined as forest. This was a golden opportunity offered by the Supreme Court to states to get the forest areas demarcated afresh.

But the state governments were finding it difficult to do away with old maps and were reluctant to carry out the task of fresh digital demarcation. After nearly two decades of the Supreme Court directive, Odisha became the first state to bring out a notification in September 2017 and prescribed a Standard Operating Procedure for demarcation of boundaries of all parcels of forest land. The humongous field operation was started in September 2019.

I recall reading somewhere: “You can’t do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yet hope to be in business tomorrow”.