Much of the forest biodiversity in India is now being largely confined to relatively less accessible hilly/mountainous terrains of the country. These regions demand special attention in terms of conservation linked sustainable management of the forestry sector, an issue that has now started receiving increasing attention amongst all the stakeholders in such an effort. These forested areas being largely inhabited by very 'traditional societies'; they include not only a vast section of ethnic groups who are politically categorized as 'tribals', so as to confer upon them special benefits and privileges as a distinctly under-privileged section of the Indian population.
However, what is to be recognized is that even the 'non-tribal' mountain societies often tend to remain equally marginalized, arising from the fact that they tend to remain cut-off from the mainstream population living in the larger plains of the country. These societies living in the 'hot-spots' of biodiversity of the country, obviously are to be seen as having an important role to play in conserving the rich biodiversity for which they are truly the custodians. Interestingly enough, for reasons linked with a variety of historical process that influenced human migration and settlement in these hilly terrains, these biodiversity 'hot spots' also happen to have a rich cultural diversity.
According to recent assessments (FAO, 2009), forest cover in the South Asian region ranges from a low of 2.5 and 6.7% of the total land area in Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively, to a high of 68% in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, with India (22.8%), Nepal (25.4%) and Sri Lanka (29.9%) lying between these extremes. Today, relatively undisturbed primary forests are found only in more remote, sparsely populated regions (particularly in the Himalayan region) and/or in protected areas throughout the region. While most of the region's forests have been utilized and managed for a variety of purposes (for wild foods and other non-timber forest products, for shifting agriculture, forest grazing of livestock, and timber extraction) for centuries, if not millennia; the intensification of these uses during recent generations has resulted in extensive areas of secondary forests, and more highly degraded vegetation formations dominated by weedy species including invasive exotics taking over vast tracts of land, a major problem in the region (Ramakrishnan, 1991).
Regardless of their condition (primary, secondary, or degraded), the region's forested landscapes are the home of most of the region's 'traditional societies'. In India alone these communities represent a substantial segment of the population who are not included in this political category (tribal) but nonetheless live as an integral part of the forested mountain ecosystems of the country. It must be emphasized that the near-term subsistence livelihood needs of these traditional societies are under constant threat, being marginalized in existence, as they are directly or indirectly dependent upon forest resources for their subsistence.
Except for patches of primary forests confined to remote hilly terrains of the country, much of the region's forests have been worked upon and altered in a variety of different ways being now largely with secondary forest formations. These secondary forests form the basis for the rich traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) used to manage these ecosystems to meet the livelihood and food security needs of forest-based communities.
With biodiversity in forested landscapes having declined rather steeply in the past, and still continuing to decline for a variety of reasons, conserving whatever is left, and indeed enhancing this biodiversity elsewhere too is a matter of urgency. Conserving this biodiversity is becoming a critical issue also arising from the realization that biodiversity has a key role to play towards coping up with ever-increasing environmental uncertainties linked with 'global change' in an ecological sense and globalization of economies (Ramakrishnan, 2006a). Further, there is also the realization that conserving and/or rehabilitating natural cultural landscapes is an effective approach towards community participatory approaches towards biodiversity conservation that will also provide multiple social, economic and environmental benefits with concerns for the intangible cultural values that traditional societies cherish (Ramakrishnan, 2006b).
In this context, though a critical evaluation of the rapidly evolving joint forest management (JFM) initiatives in the Indian region has received the attention of the foresters in the context of current policies and practices (Gupta, 2006), the impact of JFM can at best be termed only as patchy, with some bright spots here and there. Arriving at generalizable principles that would contribute towards conserving the rich forest biodiversity that could cut across diverse social, cultural, economic, and ecological situations that we are confronted with is indeed a challenge that is difficult, but not insurmountable!
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