Communitarian Forest Conservation in Alirajpur

 The Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) in Alirajpur district of Madhya Pradesh will be completing four decades this year in its fight for justice for the Bhil Adivasis. Not only has it been one of the most successful mass organisations in the country in the implementation of the Forest Rights Act for its members but it has also organised them into doing communitarian ecosystem restoration by leveraging their traditional labour pooling customs. The biggest achievement of the KMCS has been the conservation of forests, soil and water over 12500 hectares in 62 villages. The forests are either very dense (over 70% canopy cover) or medium dense (between 40% and 70% canopy cover) with one village Bada Amba having as much as 64% of its area under dense forests and overall the proportion of forest area to total land area of these villages is 24%. Analysis of Remote Sensing Data over a period of 33 years between 1990 and 2023 was carried out by the School of Climate Change and Sustainability, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, for these 62 KMCS villages and compared with 62 control villages in the district which did not have communitarian protection. The results are summarised in the map attached in which the green areas are those in which there has been increase in vegetation and the red areas are those in which there has been decrease in vegetation. The green circles are the KMCS villages where there has been communitarian ecosystem restoration work and the purple circles are the villages in which there has not been any communitarian ecosystem restoration work. Clearly, the vegetation has increased in KMCS villages as compared to the control villages.

A more detailed analysis of LandSat data with higher resolution of 900 square meter pixel size was also carried out and that shows that even in the control villages there has been increase in vegetation over the three decades from the 1990s even though there are no dense forests there as there are in the KMCS villages. So overall there has been an impact of the KMCS in the whole of Alirajpur district as people have been inspired to protect trees. This is an extremely important achievement from the perspective of Climate Change Mitigation.

Incidentally, 13000 hectares of forests were submerged by the Sardar Sarovar dam and as per the detailed project report, the Government should have done compensatory afforestation on four times that area. However, even after spending a few hundred crores, there is nothing to show. whereas the KMCS through communitarian collective action has done almost the same amount of conservation as the forests submerged.