Putting forestry on a sustainable footing is as complex as it is vital. In recent years there has been a growing concern about the failure of traditional forest management systems in India and forests in the country have continued to deteriorate under pressures of population growth, leaving a gap between the demand and supply of various forest products and the services that forests provide. It is now widely recognised that unless local communities are involved in establishing sustainable forest management systems, deforestation will continue at a rapid pace, with disastrous consequences.

The Himalayan foothills, the Shivaliks, in north India, occupy an area of nearly two million hectares in the states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. These hills, once covered by dense forests, are now totally denuded. The denudation took place after the British occupation of Punjab who encouraged settlements of loyal followers to exploit forest wealth for meeting timber and fuel needs for military cantonments. The settlers cleared land for farming and nomadic herdsmen brought cattle for grazing. In the process, rich forests gave way to bare hill slopes. Soil erosion became common and the once perennial streams became seasonal torrents, locally called 'choes'. As early at 1916, Patrick Fagan noted that these hills had become totally barren and a source of damage and destruction.

The Shivaliks are densely populated and people follow a semi pastoral occupation which is more diverse in its crops-tree-livestock interrelation. The principle arable land use consists of rain-fed cultivation of maize followed by wheat. Crop failures are very common due to erratic rainfall distribution. As individual land holdings are very small, owners are unable to live on the farm produce and thus rear sheep and goats for sale. Cattle are freely grazed in the forests in spite of stringent laws. Grass production is low and the quality of cattle is poor. This has accelerated the degradation of land and most of the foot hills have become unfit for human habitation. The problem is so acute that in highly grazed areas, as much as 4-6 cm of top soil can disappear with a single heavy shower.

Various attempts to restore a vegetative cover on these bare hill slopes have failed due to the immediate and pressing need for food, fodder and fuel and the long gestation period of forest crops. As a result, neither the hill forests regenerated nor did the people's quality of life improve, perhaps because human beings - the most powerful agent in the conservation-production equation - were not assigned any value. Gradually, it became clear that government efforts alone cannot halt the process of degradation and it would require enlisting the willing support of local people and an appreciation of their needs and wisdom.

Community and private efforts have a considerable role to play in the sustainable management of our forests, and striking successes have been achieved in states like Haryana and West Bengal. Participatory action involving the government and local communities for regeneration of degraded forests through effective protection and improving the socio-economic condition of these communities through forestry activities was initiated as as a pilot project at Arabari in West Bengal in 1971-72. The programme covered an area of 1270 hectares of degraded forests involving 618 families in 11 villages. This cooperative action demonstrated that closure of areas by villagers living on the fringe of the forest, to grating and cutting, resulted in their rapid regeneration. Based on the Arabari experience, more than 1250 village forest protection committees spread over an area of 0.152 million hectares of degraded forests were formed during the next eight years in the state. Today, over 2090 rural communities in the state participate with the government to manage 0.3 million hectares of natural forests.

The Arabari project was followed by the Sukhomajri experiment in the Shivaliks where this new concept of enlisting people's participation in the protection and management of forests evolved in the mid-70s with the active help of the state forest department and the local communities. The programme was designed to achieve increased productivity and effective resource conservation. The strategy adopted to obtain the willing cooperation and participation of the local people was to provide irrigation water to the parched fields by constructing water harvesting earth filled dams in the forest catchments. This strategy captured the attention of farmers and gave a new direction to the concept of watershed rehabilitation.

Improvement in the agricultural yield of the village became a great motivation to the farmers and it changed their attitude towards the hills. With the increase in crop yields, there was an increase in agricultural residues like wheat straw, corn stalks, etc., which reduced their dependence on fodder from the forest. The community gained confidence as the economic returns from this new management approach began to materialise. The revised National Forest Policy of 1988 in India envisages, as one of the essentials of forest management, that forest communities should be motivated to identify themselves with the programmes of protection, management, development and conservation of forests. The basic philosophy underlying the policy is to link the economic interests of the rural communities living in and around forests with sustainable management of these areas and environmental stability. Despite conflicts between communities and villages, the programme has been a major breakthrough in the involvement of local people, including women, in the regeneration and management of degraded forests. The programme halted degradation, improved the ecology of the area, recouped its biodiversity, decreased runoff and generally improved the economic condition of the people involved. The programme also had a decisive influence with regards to the involvement of women in decision making.

It has to be appreciated that joint forest management is a slow process. The basic problem is getting attitudinal changes in the staff of the forest department, policy makers and village communities to orient their target crops to this new approach. There is a need not only for an attitudinal change but also to incorporate JFM activities into the formal duty structure of the forest department. JFM has to set into the system and in fact, the forest department should adopt the system. There are places where the present mechanism is not available and therefore a new approach would have to be devised to elicit the active cooperation and participation of the user groups. A word of caution is that the work of the forest department would increase for which the department would have to gear itself to meet the challenge.