Considering the global trend of alarming deforestation, it is very important to study various forest management strategies to understand their effectiveness and limitations. It is important to conserve the forests, but the economic sustainability of the people directly linked with the forests cannot be ignored.
Due to very limited availability of the socio-economic data of the people directly dependent on forests (especially in the developing countries) and the lack of an inter-disciplinary approach interfacing the socio-economic data with the scientifically estimated forest area and its green cover density, not many studies could comprehensively bring out the effectiveness of a particular forest management approach.
<p>A recent paper by Dasa et al in Trees, Forests and People presents a study that connects these two independent datasets and underlines the usefulness of the ‘Malki practice’ driven forest management approach in the Dang forests of Gujarat. <a name="bbib0016">The Dang district, situated in the Sahyadri foothills is a highly hilly region mostly dominated by the tribal population. It has the highest forest density in the state. </a>The main occupation of the locals here is agriculture or forest-based.</p>
The word ‘Malki’ means ‘ownership’ and in 1984, the Government of Gujarat introduced the practice wherein the landholders were permitted to cut the trees for economic gains provided they had initiated the plantation of the requisite number of trees against the trees to be cut. The provisions contained in the practice gradually evolved during the 25 years (1984-2009).
The study uses the remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to estimate the green cover density in the Dang forests, a statistical approach for assessing the type of trend in the NDVI (increasing or decreasing at different significance levels) and the socio-economic data generated by the State Forest Department regarding the earnings made through the sale of logs and the household surveys.
<p style="margin-bottom:11px">The environmental success of the Malki practice can be seen from the fact that 74% of the Dang forests witnessed an increasing trend in the green cover density which backs the fact that around one million trees would have been planted in the forest in-lieu of the 200,000 trees which were cut during 1994–2019. Also, the economic success of the Malki practice can be attributed to the fact that 19,936 land holders earned 39.4 million US $ through the sale of logs. </p>
<p>This economic gain would have definitely improved the quality of life of the beneficiaries and their families. The one-to-one interaction with the 400 beneficiaries of the ‘Malki practice’ revealed that around 81% of them who were earlier economically dependent on others become self-reliant. 59% had the annual income in the range of $260–550, followed by 15, 8 and 3% who annually earned in the range of $550–1000, $1000–1300 and more than $1300 while only 15% had the annual income less than $260.</p>
This is noteworthy because the people annually earning less than $157 come under ‘below poverty line’. 94% of the beneficiaries had a house of their own though only 19% of them had house with proper walls and roof of concrete while the remaining 81% of them had the house built with mud, grass and thatch. These facts clearly indicate that the ‘Malki practice’ indeed improved the socio-economic conditions of the land holders thereby positively impacting their quality of life.
From this study, it can be decisively said that ‘Malki practice’ is a classic case of sustainable development exhibiting that a sound-incentivized policy along with wide public awareness can create wonders.
<p>In addition to this, by incorporating measures like using satellite data and (or) drone survey for forest mapping, creating digital database of land holdings, collecting the GPS locations of Malki led afforestation-deforestation and preparing the annual sustainable development map, ranking of the land holders based on the health of their trees, incorporation of the social security schemes; the effectiveness of the Malki practice for forest conservation can be significantly increased.</p>
Malki practice can be considered as an alternative to, for example, shifting cultivation or Jhum cultivation or Swidden agriculture (a technique of rotational farming in which land is cleared for cultivation normally by fire) and then left to regenerate for few years) which is practiced in some parts of the North East region of India, Bangladesh, Latin America and Central Africa and indigenous people may be encouraged to derive livelihood from the wood based products subject to compensatory afforestation (around 3–5 times).
The present study would be of great help for not only revamping and (or) fine-tuning the forest management strategies being implemented across the world but also for evaluating the effectiveness of a particular forest management strategy.