Hyderabad, January 12: “The Indian Forest Act of 1947 is predicated on the assumption that people who depend on the forest for their sustenance are criminals. The time has come for us to allow experimentation in the management of our common resources and take a re-look at the legal regime. Unless the local people have an economic stake in the common resource that they are asked to protect, management of the resources is not going to happen,” Union Environment and Forest minister Jairam Ramesh said on Monday.
Speaking at the 13th IASC (International Association for the Study of Commons) 2011, the union minister said that in an attempt to break-up the mono institutions culture in the management of commons, the central ministry has formulated a new set of laws for the coastal areas in the country.
“With a 7000 kilometers coastline spread across the country, a monocentric approach of management had been continued for too long. The new law released two days back by our ministry now earmarks certain coastal areas like Lakshwadweep Islands, Andaman Islands, Mumbai-the only island city in the country, Goa, the backwaters of Kerala, Sunderbans and the Chilka lake as unique,” he said. Highlighting the fact that development of the country will necessarily extract an ecological cost and trade-offs are inevitable,the minister stressed on the need to make choices.
The conference chair, Nitin Desai (a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change) meanwhile said that land has been classified and misclassified in the past and it has cost the ecology in a big way.
“The environmental issues are issues about global commerce and the challenge ahead of us lies in focusing our attention to make the issues an important part of social sciences,” he said.
Noble laureate Elinor Obstrom said that it is extremely important to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach in the management of commons. “Although a lot of material, through extensive filed studies, is available for the researchers, the lack of cumulation has been a problem. Moreover focusing on the collective action theory at the core of our social sciences and policy is important,” she said.
–Agencies