000 01806pab a2200169 454500
008 180718b2002 xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100 _aD'Silva, Emmanuel
245 _aBehroonguda: a race success story in joint forest management
260 _c2002
300 _ap.551-57
362 _a9 Feb
520 _aBehroonguda is one of 77,000 hamlets and villages in Andhra Pradesh. The 97 families who belong to the Gond and Naikpod tribes formed themselves into a forest protection group in 1990, but the state government officially recognised their efforts in 1993. In 1998, five years after the recognition of the committee - referred to as Vana Samarakshana Samithi, or VSS - Behroonguda residents began to derive usufruct benefits from the forest. The case study documents the efforts of the villagers, the cots they have borne and the benefits they have derived from protecting 500 hectares of degraded forest allotted to them as part of the joint forest management (JFM) in Andhra Pradesh. The VSS is widely regarded as being successful. The paper analyses the reasons for the success of JFM and compares the experience of Behroonguda with other similar experiments in other countries to draw important lessons. The paper strikes one discordant note: The people of Behroonguda have not been clearly told when the forest department's financial and technical support would end. For JFM to be sustainable, it is important that forest staff be redeployed to other needy communities and the financial support to silvicultural and other conservation activities be discontinued. Only then will the Behroonguda experiment be deemed fully successful and sustainable. - Reproduced.
650 _aForest management
700 _aNagnath, B.
773 _aEconomic and Political Weekly
909 _a51487
999 _c51487
_d51487