THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

een his concern: ie there has been in K3 a revolution of
community forestry thought and the activities of the project
are considered by many to be at the cutting edge of the
business.
5. 1 have no address to write to and would be grateful for
you to forward this letter to Mr Russell. 1 would be grateful
too, if Mr Russell would contact the British Embassy at some
stage to see if he can meet either Dr Francis or myself on one
of our visits to Nepal in the interests of collaboration,
Rosalind Eyben promptly wrote a careful reply in my defence pointing
out that I was funded by the ESRC and not the ODA, and that my principal
objective had to be to meet the requirement of my academic supervisors.
Furthermore, my official links with the Nepal government were through
Tribhuvan University, not the ODA. She said she had found my research
reports "very interesting end illuminating and with points worth noting
concerning indigenous perceptions around the use of forestry resourcesw.
She also pointed out that I clearly provided a postal address in Nepal
at the end of all my reports,
I wrote back to the affronted agronomist (who never replied and has
since retired) to say that his letter had done nothing to boost my faith
in the value of collaboration, although I remained strongly committed to
the principle of making 'academic1 research more relevant to 'non-
academic' organisatfons, If he had read my earlier research reports he
would have known that the Yakha were an ethnic group at the heart of the
IK3' project area, and that I would have thought that any information
concerning the use of the natural environment by these previously
unrssearched people was far from esoteric and of great potential value
to the ODA, I saw myself as doing research which the ODA, with its
tight budgetary end time constraints, would not normally have been able
to carry out, in the indigenous language of the host population, I did