Using WebGIS and Socio-Ecological Knowledge for Facilitating CFR Rights in Bastar
Ananya Rao, Anubhav Shori, and Sharachchandra Lele
(on behalf of the ATREE CFR in Central India team)
(BLOG)
How do we as researchers help in the implementation of a progressive but complex piece of nature resource legislation? The implementation of the Forest Rights Act of 2006, especially its community rights provisions, has raised this question for us repeatedly. Typically, research tends to be post-facto: showing what went wrong with Joint Forest Management, or throwing light on how implementation could have been better in the case of the FRA. Supporting ongoing implementation efforts presents a different challenge: interfacing our somewhat academic understanding with the particular ground realities of state administration and people’s priorities. Our new project on “Training, Capacity-Building and Decision Support for CFR Rights Recognition and Management in Bastar district”, where the Bastar district administration invited us to provide such support, has thrown us this challenge. But we are heartened to find that our specialised knowledge can indeed make a difference!
Under the landmark Forest Rights Act of 2006, the Community Forest Resource Rights provision enables the devolution of forest management rights into the hands of villagers. But the claiming of these rights by forest-dwelling communities has not been easy for a variety of reasons. Even when, as in Chhattisgarh state, the state government has been eager to facilitate this devolution, actual implementation is a challenge. Neither do the villagers nor the ground-level officials charged with facilitating the process have a good understanding of this provision, nor is there a simple way for them to ‘map’ the claim or identify the claimed area in a way that both the villagers and the administration understand. The fact that the Revenue department’s maps don’t show forest compartment boundaries and the Forest Department’s maps don’t show revenue village boundaries just adds to the confusion. In other words, the villagers and the officials are not on the same page! Moreover, the patwaris (village accountants who hold revenue records) seem to think that since the area being claimed is a forest, it only falls under the jurisdiction of the forest department, and stay away from this process. But letting the forest department run the process of communities claiming rights over forest is a fraught one for obvious reasons!
To address this gap and confusion, the CFR team at ATREE has developed a webGIS system (a mapping system accessible through a web browser) that superimposes four types of maps of Bastar district: a Google Earth/Bing satellite map, the village (revenue) boundary map, the forest compartment map, and cadastral maps of each village (showing the parcels inside the village). This webGIS is probably the first time in India that revenue boundaries, forest compartments, and cadastrals have been overlaid on a single basemap and made publicly and easily browsable. This allows both the villagers as well as the administration to identify the forest area that lies in and around each village and develop their claim for it. It also serves as a way for patwaris and forest guards to understand each other’s maps.
The usefulness of the WebGIS system in understanding the landscape in conjunction with various different boundaries is illustrated in the sequence of images below of Jharumargaon and neighbouring villages. One is able to see the satellite view of a village overlaid with revenue boundaries (red lines), forest compartment boundaries (green lines) and the village cadastral map. Through this, one is able to see how much forest a village has within its revenue boundary, which khasra numbers are associated with this forest area, and whether all of these patches have forest compartment numbers. Note how a patch between Jharumargaon and Aasana village is not in any revenue village, but an RF outside village boundaries. Note also how the forest compartments stretch across village boundaries.
A map of the revenue boundary of Jharumargaon village (and neighbouring villages) in Bakawand block, overlaid on Google Earth satellite view