Impact of social forestry among the farmers of Jaunpur district (Uttar Pradesh)

Abstract

The concept of social forestry is so far as it relates to conditions in rural India is not new. Only as far back as 6-7 decades when one reviews the economy of rural India, one comes across the basic fact that a large part of the rural population used to sustain itself on the availability of forest produce in one way or the other. In the past there used to be small village forests attached to practically every village or in some cases for groups of villages. These village forests were not necessarily classified as forest land. In fact they were classified as cultivable wastelands or tree-lands and miscellaneous growth. However, when the population started growing rather at a faster rate due to various health measures adopted by the Government, the forests which used to meet the requirements of the villagers in respect of firewood, small timber, grass, fruits and seeds, etc. were the first to be cleared for food production because food was definitely more important than any other produce. The situation in the thickly populated Indo-Genetic plain became so worse that in many of the districts now there are hardly any village forest lands. With the basic resource of firewood supply thus gone, the villagers were forced to burn cow dung as fuel. This led to reduction in the quantity of available organic manure in the agriculture fields leading to a gradual reduction in their productivity. Thus a vicious circle has been created in which, in many cases, even the normal food production became lower than before.