Conflict Between Neighboring Communities and the Role of the Forest Department as Mediator

A village in Gujarat had actively protected a degraded teak forest for the last five years. Regular patrols of five families in a shift walked the boundaries of the forest every day and night, passing on a bamboo staff with five knots to the next shift as a symbol of their responsibilities. One night, the patrol discovered a group of 13 people from a neighboring village cutting bamboo poles and teak trees in the middle of the night. An alarm was raised and several dozen Forest Protection Committee (FPC) members set out to apprehend the poachers. A chase ensued, and two of the offenders were caught. Their hands were bound with rope and they were marched 20 kilometers in the dark to the home of the Range Forest Officer (RFO) at two o'clock in the morning. The startled RFO questioned the two poachers and fined them each 100 rupees the next morning before letting them go. It seemed a small contractor in the neighboring village had hosted a party, fueled a group with drinks and good meat dishes, and sent them over to cut some wood from the increasingly attractive JFM forest nearby. The RFO began to contact the other 11 wood poachers to collect fines from them, and was working on filing a report on the contractor.

Meanwhile, a group of FPC members became quite upset with this chain of events. They felt slighted that the RFO had handed out his sentence without consulting them, as they were now protecting the forest and had caught the culprits. Furthermore, they felt that 100 rupees was much too low a fine, considering that several thousand rupees worth of bamboo and teak had been cut. "What is to stop them coming again?" they wondered. A FPC meeting was called four days later when the FPC leader returned from a trip and tempers had cooled. At the meeting, representatives of a local NGO working with the FPC encouraged people to air their views and opinions. They urged the RFO to repeat some very complimentary things he had said about the villagers: "This is the first time in my 12 years of service that villagers have themselves captured someone cutting wood and brought the culprits to my house for punishment. While foresters are sleeping in their beds, people are bringing in offenders." He clearly had developed new respect for the resolve and ability of FPC members to protect their forest.

The villagers were encouraged by the NGO staff to raise their objections to the fines and the lack of consultation. In the course of a very open discussion, the RFO explained his position. He said that if he had consulted the village before imposing the fines, it would have appeared as if one village was directly punishing a neighbor, which might have further increased the conflict between the two. The RFO explained that he preferred to take swift and moderate action rather than impose a very large fine that either would not be paid or would be reduced to a small fine long after the event. This way there was at least a direct link between infringement and punishment. This was grudgingly accepted by the visitors, with a new appreciation for the complexity of the RFO's position. He was urged, though, to be tough on the contractor, who many felt was ultimately responsible.

The leader of the FPC then spoke philosophically about the problems ahead. He wondered aloud about the results of their actions. By protecting what was essentially a barren common land they had created a resource that was growing in value and increasingly coveted by neighbors. Would this lead to conflict between villages? How could they avoid this? Was it worth the trouble? They had to consult more with their neighbors and develop a better understanding of the implications this held for the future.

Jeffrey Y. Campbell, "Joint Forest Management in India," Social Change, March 1992: Vol 22, No 1.