Sacred Groves and Community Conservation: Exam Notes

Long before a forest department existed, villages across India had already fenced off patches of forest that no one was allowed to cut. The patch belonged to a deity, a serpent god, an ancestor or a village mother goddess, and the fear of the deity did the work that a guard and a fine do today. These patches are the sacred groves of India, and they are the oldest form of conservation the country has. Examiners like the topic for a simple reason: every grove carries a local name tied to a state, and modern law has grown a set of categories, from community reserves to Biodiversity Heritage Sites, that give the same idea a legal shape.

What a sacred grove is

A sacred grove is a patch of natural vegetation that a local community protects on religious grounds, where felling, hunting and often even the collection of dead wood are forbidden. The rules are social, not statutory: they are enforced by the village, the clan or the priest. Because they have been left untouched for centuries, many groves hold the last stand of the original vegetation of their region, which is why ecologists call them relict or climax patches and treat them as natural gene banks. A grove is usually small, from a few trees around a shrine to several hectares of dense forest, and very often it protects a spring, a tank or the head of a stream, so it is a water source as much as a forest.

Local names, state by state

The name is the single most asked fact of this chapter, because a match the pair question writes itself.

The best known single grove is the Mawphlang sacred forest of the Khasi hills in Meghalaya, kept by the Lyngdoh clan, where visitors are told that nothing, not even a fallen leaf, may be carried out. The Orans of western Rajasthan are grazing groves of khejri and other desert trees that double as pasture, water point and habitat, and the Great Indian Bustard survives largely on such land.

Communities that guard nature

The Bishnois of western Rajasthan are the standing example. Their sect was founded by Guru Jambheshwar, or Jambhoji, in 1485, and his twenty nine rules, from which the name Bishnoi comes, forbid the felling of green trees and the killing of animals. In 1730, when men of the Jodhpur state came to cut khejri trees for a palace kiln at Khejarli, Amrita Devi and hundreds of Bishnois clasped the trees and were killed one after another. The Union environment ministry named a wildlife protection award after Amrita Devi for communities that defend wildlife, and the Bishnoi villages are still the reason the blackbuck and the chinkara survive around Jodhpur. The same instinct produced the Chipko movement of 1973 in Chamoli in the Garhwal hills, led by Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna, and its southern echo, the Appiko movement of 1983 in Uttara Kannada in Karnataka, led by Panduranga Hegde. In the Kumaon hills the Van Panchayats, village forest councils set up under rules framed in 1931, still manage a large share of the civil forest.

From custom to law

Independent India has slowly given the old practice a legal frame. The Arabari experiment in Midnapore in West Bengal in the early nineteen seventies, where a forest officer shared the sal harvest with the villagers who protected it, became the model for Joint Forest Management, which the National Forest Policy of 1988 and the circular that followed it took to the whole country. The amendment of the Wild Life (Protection) Act in 2002 created two new categories of protected area: the conservation reserve, usually a buffer or corridor on government land, and the community reserve, declared on private or community land where people volunteer to protect wildlife, each run by a management committee. The Biological Diversity Act of 2002 set up a Biodiversity Management Committee in every local body, asked it to keep a People Biodiversity Register of local species and uses, and let a state government declare a Biodiversity Heritage Site; the first such site was the Nallur tamarind grove near Bengaluru in Karnataka. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 then recognised, among other rights, the right of a village to protect and manage its community forest resource, and also the right over sacred and customary places inside the forest.

Why the groves are shrinking

Groves are lost not by a single order but by slow erosion: urban spread and road building, encroachment and grazing pressure, the replacement of an open shrine under a tree by a concrete temple with a paved yard, invasive species such as lantana and prosopis, fragmentation into patches too small to regenerate, and the plain fact that the young in a village no longer fear the deity who protected them. Documentation by state biodiversity boards, mapping as community reserves or heritage sites, and the recognition of Orans as deemed forest are the remedies being tried.