Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Transgressing Political Spaces and Claiming Citizenship 65
MAA MANINAG JUNGLE SURAKHYA PARISHAD:
ORIGIN AND EMERGENCE
The MMJSP is a federation of forest-protecting villages in Ranpur block.
This federation emerged in 1997 after a series of meetings and consultations
at the level of villages and clusters of villages, in which issues
confronting forest protection groups were discussed. Vasundhara, a
Bhubaneswar-based NGO working on community forestry issues, played
an important role in facilitating the process. At the time of its formation,
about 85 villages came together to form the MMJSP. Over the years, the
membership of the Parishad increased to 137 communities in 2003, and
to 187 communities in 2005. These forest protection communities include
revenue villages, settlements (hamlets), or groups of villages.
In this area, there were also pre-existing examples of clusters of villages
coming together to extend mutual support for protecting forests. To coordinate
inter-village cooperation, cluster-level committees such as the
‘Sata Mouza Jungle Surakhya Committee’ (seven villages’ forest protection
committee), ‘Sulia Sata Bhaya Jungle Surakhya Samukhya’ (Sulia seven
brothers’ forest protection group), ‘Dhani Pancha Mouza Jungle Surakhya
Committee’ and ‘Dasa Mouza Jungle Surakhya Samiti’ came up. These were
groups of villages that had come together to protect a common or contiguous
forest patch, and had evolved rules and regulations to this end.
Although the history of how these villages came together is different, the
common drivers were the dependence of several villages on a commonly
shared and used forest patch, the need for collaborative arrangements to
minimise conflicts over use and boundaries, and to be able to effectively
protect the patch from outsiders.
Such cluster-level forums helped strengthen community-based forest
protection efforts and were more effective in protecting forests from unregulated
use, both within these villages as well as from outsiders. While
such cluster-level committees arose from a more immediate need of collective
arrangements to protect a forest patch that was not necessarily
easily divisible amongst individual villages, these provided useful examples
for collective action at higher spatial scales. These examples also demonstrated
the advantages of networking and working together to strengthen
community forestry initiatives and to resolve conflicts.