




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 4 (1): 123–128, January 2021 

 
NOTES FROM THE FIELD  
 

So Near Yet So Far: A Narrative from a Forest-
dwelling Gaddi Community in Chamba, Himachal 
Pradesh 
 

Kritishnu Sanyal,  Anupreet Kaur,  Shyamasree Dasgupta  
 
1. INTRODUCTION 

―We exist as the trees exist‖,1 our respondent said with a chuckle when we 
asked how the surrounding forests helped her sustain. This was in one of 
the three Gaddi villages in the Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh (HP) 
that we visited between August 2019 and March 2020. The Gaddis are a 
semi-nomadic Scheduled Tribe who live mostly in parts of the western 
Indian Himalayan region. Agriculture and animal husbandry are their main 
sources of livelihood, and they practise winter migration. Because of the 
remoteness of our study location, other than a few research scholars, 
occasional tourists, and forest produce merchants, hardly anyone from the 
outside visits these villages. This note briefly narrates two significant 
observations from the site on how the Gaddi villagers perceive the ―forest‖ 
as a natural resource and their thorough sense of alienation from the entire 
gamut of forest management practices. We interviewed people from 60 
randomly selected households using a semi-structured questionnaire and 

                                                           
 Doctoral Student, School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS), Indian Institute of 
Technology Mandi (IIT-M), Himachal Pradesh 175075, India; sanyalkritishnu@gmail.com. 

 
 Project Associate, SHSS, IIT-M; anupreetk98@gmail.com. 

 Assistant Professor, SHSS, IIT-M; shyamasree.dasgupta@gmail.com. 

Copyright © Sanyal, Kaur, Dasgupta 2021. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i1.309 

1  Exact quote: ―Ped hain to hum bhi hain‖. Respondent: a 36-year-old 
schoolteacher (woman); date: 16 March 2020; time: 15:20 IST; location: Sirad; 
interviewer: Author 1. 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i1.309


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [124] 

engaged in multiple other informal discussions that formed a part of a more 
extensive survey. 

 

2. BENEFITS FROM FOREST ECOSYSTEMS ARE TOO 
OBVIOUS TO REPORT 

The valuation of anything is related to its contribution toward achieving a 
specific goal (Costanza and Folke 1997, 49). Such goals vary between 
stakeholders. The ―ecological identity‖ (Kumar and Kumar 2008, 818) of 
the stakeholder is significant in such value formation. Since the valuations 
of forest ecosystem services are mainly determined by experts attaching 
values to these services given their scientific knowledge, we wanted to 
explore whether the communities living in proximity to forestlands also 
similarly recognize their value.  

To understand this, we first asked respondents to name the 
products/services that they collect/derive from the forest. The most 
frequent, spontaneous responses were ―fodder‖ and ―fuel wood‖. While 
most respondents also collected food items, such as Guchchhi and Lingdu, 
and medicinal plants, such as Banafsha and Nagchhatri, 2  most forgot to 
mention these initially and reported these names only after further probing. 
This underreporting led us to question whether the villagers did it 
deliberately because they collected food items and medicinal plants without 
a licence. In some cases, a licence is required since the forest is not an open 
one. We found that for the most part, the villagers were unaware that a 
licence may be required or the type of forest (open or protected) from 
which they collected resources. So it seemed unlikely that the 
underreporting was deliberate. They expressed their point of view saying, 
―taking things is not taking advantage of, but getting necessary help from, 
the forest for sustenance‖3 and, ―one can‘t be a thief in their own house‖.4  

                                                           
2 ―Guchchhi‖ (common morel mushroom, Morchella esculenta); ―Lingdu‖ (fiddlehead 
fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris); ―Banafsha‖ (Viola odorata); and ―Nagchhatri‖ (Trillium 
govanianum). 

3 Exact quote: ―Jungle se kuchh lena matlab jungle ka faida uthana thodi na hai; 
hum bas apni jarurat ke hisabsehi lete hai‖. Respondent: a 38-year-old farmer-cum-
contractual labourer (woman); date: 26 August 2019; time: 17:08 IST; location: 
Jhikli Kugti; interviewer: Author 1. 

4 Exact quote: ―Apne ghar pe to koi chori nahi karta na?‖ Respondent: a 22-year-
old master‘s student-cum-small tea shop owner (man); date: 27 August 2019; time: 
12:42 IST; location: Jhikli Kugti; interviewer: Author 1.  



[125] Kritishnu Sanyal, Anupreet Kaur, Shyamasree Dasgupta 

The respondents primarily talked about ―provisioning services‖ they derive 
from the forestland. But does that mean that they have no understanding of 
other ecosystem services such as ―regulating‖, ―supporting‖, and ―cultural‖? 
While our interviewees were mostly unaware of various supporting services 
(such as pollination, habitat, and soil fertility), they had an in-depth 
understanding of regulating services (carbon sequestration, climate control, 
watershed management, etc.). However, they thought that these were too 
obvious to mention and expressed amusement that we were asking such 
basic questions. They were most surprised when we asked them whether 
they could attach any monetary value to these services. Moreover, they were 
not aware of the market prices of fodder, fuel food, and food items—in 
most cases, they consumed the forest produce that they collected.  

Evidently, a community that derives benefit from the forestland cannot 
easily place a value on it. Our interactions revealed that the process of value 
formation for the community was different from that of the external 
scientific community.  

 

3. PARTICIPATION IN FOREST MANAGEMENT: THE PAST 
AND THE PRESENT 

Forests in South Asia have historically been inhabited by several tribal and 
non-tribal communities, whose livelihoods significantly depend on 
forestlands (Lele 2019, 22). Following the drive for participatory forest 
management in the world and India in the 1990s, the Indian Forest Rights 
Act, 2006 (FRA) (MOTA 2007), recognized a ―forest-dwelling scheduled 
tribe‖ community‘s right to ―manage any community forest resource which 
they have been traditionally protecting and conserving for sustainable use‖ 
(MoTA 2007, 4). While the wishful belief is that the philosophy of forest 
management in India has shifted from a strict top–down model to a 
cooperative one, the question remains whether the communities feel the 
same way.  

Most families in the studied villages had ancestral houses in which they had 
been living for many decades. They recalled traditional forest management 
practices based on deity institutions and the Rakha (the keeper) and Praza 
(the public) systems. These institutions are also mentioned in the works of 
Dhiman (2001, 932), Gupta (2006, 14), and Vasan and Kumar (2006, 332). 
Deity institutions, run by a Devta committee (pre-sixteenth century to the 
present), historically controlled, and still control, the social, cultural, moral, 
economic, and political lives of the villagers. In turn, the villagers protect 
the nearby forests from exploitation as they believe that the deities are 
settled in these forests and that transgressors will be duly punished. In the 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [126] 

Rakha system (pre-sixteenth century to 1950), a villager was nominated and 
employed by the village community to guard the local forests and received 
remuneration from all the households. After the Indian Forest Department 
(IFD) was established in 1864, this system became partially institutionalized. 
The rakha became a joint employee of both the state and the local 
community and started receiving a small cash payment from the state along 
with community payments. This practice of the IFD paying the rakha was 
questioned and rejected in the neighbouring district of Kangra in 1924, 
resulting in the fall of the Rakha system in HP (Singh 1998). In the Praza 
system (1950–1980), with the mutual consent of all the villagers, the village 
pradhan (chief) nominated 10–15 members to be a part of a committee 
called the praza. The praza organized major social practices related to 
collective resource extraction and its use and management. However, all 
these systems were non-inclusive as these were mostly run and managed by 
the upper-caste Gaddis, and women‘s participation was nil.  

The influence of traditional institutions has reduced over time, and, at 
present, there is no locally elected body to manage forests. Similar to the 
reality in the rest of the country, the current forest management system in 
HP follows a hierarchical structure, and legal rights are implemented 
through the state forest department. While HP has extensive experience in 
joint forest management, the studied area did not utilize any such 
institutionalized forest management practices. On one hand, while strong 
bureaucratic resistance has prevented the granting of communities‘ rights 
promised under the FRA in various parts of the country (Lele 2019, 26), the 
villagers here did not even know about the existence of the FRA. 

The Gaddi community in the studied villages, with has a history of strong, 
traditional forest management practices, felt alienated from the present 
forest management system in the absence of participatory forest 
management processes: ―Our forest is no longer ‗our forest‘; it has become 
government‘s forest. So whether we protect it or not doesn‘t matter‖.5 Now 
they only engage in a wide variety of centre and state government–run 
schemes and community development programmes and other livelihood 
projects. We found that government interventions in local communities 
were limited to recruiting villagers on a daily-wage basis for afforestation 
under schemes such as Sanjhi Van Yojna. The villagers expressed 

                                                           
5 Exact quote: ―Humare jungal ab humare nahi sarkar ke ban chuke hain. Isliye 
hum unki raksha kare iya na kare usse koi farak nahi padta‖. Respondent: a 60-year-
old farmer (woman); date: 18 March 2020; time: 18:13 IST; location: Thathan; 
interviewer: Author 2.  



[127] Kritishnu Sanyal, Anupreet Kaur, Shyamasree Dasgupta 

discontent about the fact that nobody ever asked them how the forestland 
should be managed. This made them reluctant to embrace existing forest 
management policies and they simply deflected them instead. There is no 
reason to believe that they criticize government policies for the sake of it. 
They appreciate the role of government forest policies with their attached 
legalities in promoting caste and gender equity, increasing canopy cover, 
etc., as all this may be difficult to achieve under traditional systems. 
However, they feel completely alienated from the entire discourse.  

 

4. REFLECTION 

The experiences of these villagers are not representative of all forest 
dependent communities, but definitely of some. We observe that there is a 
difference between the process of value formation for forest products and 
services between the local community and the external scientific 
community. The Gaddi villagers did not even spontaneously recognize 
some of the important services because they felt that they were too 
obvious. We believe that this is one of the reasons why we see significant 
underreporting of forest produce collection in the existing literature. For 
forest management, there was neither a ―politics of collaboration‖ nor a 
―politics of partnership‖ (Guha 2001, 232–233). The community 
experienced a transition from traditional participatory ―forest management 
system‖ practices to participating in ―forest conservation‖ as wage 
labourers. Therefore, while the academic discourse and philosophical 
standpoints of forest policies thrive on stating that the community as a 
stakeholder should participate significantly in managing forests within a 
legal framework established by the state, our field study revealed quite the 
opposite. 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

We are grateful to our respondents for their valuable time and insights.  

 

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Dhiman, R. C. 2001. ―Traditional Initiatives in Participatory Forest Management: 
Dodra-Kwar (Shimla-HP) Experience.‖ Indian Forester 127 (8): 929–935.  



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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42761964_Cultural_Significance_of_Indigenous_Institutions_and_Forest_Management_Practices_in_the_Indian_Himalayas_Implications_for_Policy_and_Sustainable_Livelihoods
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https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i2.71

