It’s late morning and the sound of axes clacking against wood echoes through Pachgaon’s bamboo forest in the central Indian state of Maharashtra. A huge depot, larger than a cricket stadium, is full of bamboo branches, stacked neatly by size in different sections. Nearby is a small, windowless office painted in the colours of the forest – a record-keeper of Pachgaon’s turnaround from abject poverty to relative wealth in just over a decade.
Pachgaon’s rags-to-riches story follows the implementation of two longstanding Indian laws that restored to the local adivasi (tribal) community its traditional ownership rights over the forest, which they lost to rulers and colonisers several generations ago.
Under the laws – the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996 – tribal village councils, or panchayats, can apply for “community forest rights papers”, or title deeds to designated forest resources, and constitute their own gram sabhas (village assemblies) to take decisions on governance and the marketing of the fruit, seeds, herbs and trees that they harvest and cut in the forest.
When the laws came into force, they were hailed as progressive legislation that would correct the historical injustices that tribal communities had suffered for years. But poor awareness on the part of forest dwellers, and reluctance on the part of the state to hand over complete control, meant they were rarely enacted.
However, Pachgaon’s residents pursued their entitlement with dogged persistence, and were granted papers confirming their community forest rights in 2012, winning control of 1,006 hectares (2,486 acres) of forest land – with stunning results. The village’s bamboo business made a profit of 3.7m rupees (£35,000) in the last financial year and a total of 34m rupees in the past decade.
“Earlier, the forest was with the forest department, but now it is with us. We have formulated 115 rules on how to expand it, nurture it and protect it,” says Sanjay Gajanan Gopanwar, a gram sabha member.
Pachgaon is a small village of about 300 people, many of them from the Gond community, one of India’s largest tribes. “People here are largely landless and depend on the jungle for their living,” says Gopanwar.
“Farming work in our village was not steady owing to frequent floods every monsoon that damaged the crops. Villagers had no choice but to migrate for work to Karnataka and Gujarat. But even after putting in 12 hours a day, they never had enough money.”
The decades-old pattern would have remained unchanged had it not been for the campaigner Vijay Dethe, who was working to improve livelihoods in neighbouring villages and passed Pachgaon every day.
“I would identify Pachgaon from its bamboo trees,” says Dethe, sipping tea in a roadside cafe, as he recalls helping villagers to implement the newly enacted National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which offers 100 days of paid labour to adults. The scheme had helped draw some migrants back to Pachgaon, who wished to find work in the village itself even if it did not pay as well as their city jobs.
As the desperation for work mounted, villagers approached Dethe, who was fresh out of college, to check if there was some way that could bring in more income than the NREGA scheme. Dethe saw the answer in the rich bamboo reserve and told the villagers about the Forest Rights Act 2006, which would give them the opportunity to own the forest.
In 2009, Pachgaon applied for community forest rights. It waited three years for a response but continued to pursue its claim, sending reminders to officials and even planning a protest. But before they could take to the streets, the village received its papers on 25 June 2012, a date it now celebrates annually as Van Haq Divas (Forest Rights Day). “The day we got the papers was a festival,” says Vinod Ramswaroop Tekam, a 35-year-old villager. “We were overwhelmed that we had won this right, that our satyagraha [nonviolent protest] had paid off. We were now 100% assured that the forest was really ours.
“After we got the papers, many villagers returned from the cities to which they had migrated. Now bamboo is our source of income.”
Records show that the village sold 8,100 bamboo bundles for about 700,000 rupees in 2013, the first year of its business. The next year, it sold more than 17,000 bundles; this time fetching revenue of 2.7m rupees.
In the past decade, the business has raked in revenue of nearly 6m rupees a year, though revenue plummeted to less than 800,000 rupees in 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The gram sabha ensured that its employees – about 70 villagers who cut bamboo in the forest – were paid at all times and no one had to leave the village to look for work.
As the business grew, so did the paperwork. The village constructed a one-room office with a computer and printer in 2015. However, it decided against a hierarchical structure. “We don’t have a chairman or secretary,” said Gopanwar. “If one person is appointed as the head, then people interact with just that person. This way, everyone is involved.”
The villagers of Pachgaon are not number-crunching, business-minded people poring over spreadsheets to track revenue and profits. But they are very clear what the revenue is for: to create jobs in the village, fund raw materials to build homes and to support college education for young villagers.
The bamboo-cutting season ends with the onset of the monsoon. The gram sabha then pays wages for work such as filling potholes, cleaning drains and digging reservoirs, with each person getting at least 10 to 15 days of work a month.
“It’s simple,” says Gajanan Themke, 43, a worker-manager at the gram sabha. “If we don’t create jobs, people will migrate. More people in the village means better work and better execution of work.”
Resting in his courtyard after a long day in the forest, Themke says the villagers do not feel like they are working any more. “We are our own masters,” he says, gazing at the axes that he and his wife, Jyoti, use to cut bamboo.
The couple had cut 100 branches that day and made 840 rupees, more than twice the amount they used to earn as migrant day labourers in a cement factory.
They have saved enough money to rebuild their home with concrete and cultivate a small kitchen garden. The tomatoes, aubergines and grapes grown here are not for selling – the family eats them and shares their produce with neighbours.
As well as helping villagers to construct houses, the proceeds are funding their children’s education. More young people are earning a college degree, and two have completed their master’s degrees, the first to do so in the village.
The gram sabha has also struck a blow for equality, with the same pay for men and women , and all villagers involved in the business treated the same. There is no hierarchy – the person chairing a meeting becomes the decision-maker for that day and could be chopping wood the next.
“Men would always get paid more than us for the same amount of work,” says Jaishree Tarache Atram, 36, who used to do odd jobs as a migrant worker. “Everything was a challenge for us – food, health, education. We worked hard to earn a living but still found it difficult to make ends meet. Now we have equal wages, which helps.”
Pachgaon is also looking ahead. Aware that new coppices are needed to continue earning a living from bamboo, the villagers are expanding their plantations.
They have also realised that they need to diversify into other products, and for this the gram sabha bought more than four hectares of land from its profits two years ago with a view to storing forest produce other than bamboo and housing a food-processing unit for the jamun fruit (or Indian blackberry) and tendu and bel leaves foraged from the jungle.
The village is also awaiting approval for its application for ownership of another 900-hectare piece of forest land in 2014, which will further grow the business.
Themke sums up Pachgaon’s dream: “Our next generation will live here,” he says. “If they don’t get jobs elsewhere, they will always have the forest business.”
• This article was first published by the Migration Story, India’s first newsroom to focus on the country’s vast internal migrant population
