Jagdeesh Puppala

Through the Foundation for Ecological Security, Jagdeesh has built an integrated methodology that brings together principles of self-governance, community cohesion and justice to enable the revival of the commons in India.

Jagdeesh Rao is working to dispel the notion of tragedy of the commons and convert it into “the promise of the commons,” by strengthening local community institutions, assisting communities to file for claim rights to these lands through legal parameters, and concentrating on Common Property Resources, as these offer a single platform to collectively address issues of social justice, ecological restoration and poverty alleviation.

Instead of considering farming as crop production alone, Jagdeesh views its interconnections with the larger farming system. The larger system includes other resources beyond the farm, such as forests, pastures, bodies of water, livestock, pollinators and also pest predators, which connect different land and water resources. As Jagdeesh’s work is often located in ecologically degraded and poverty prone areas, he engages local communities in deciding options that meet subsistence requirements and generate income, as well as the likely impact of their choices on the ecological thresholds over time. As this kind of systems understanding is innate and latent within farming society, the efforts on connecting agriculture, livestock and pastures/forests find ready resonance.

Jagdeesh’s intervention starts by locating forests and natural resources within the larger ecological, social and economic landscape so that conservation is determined by the local context. He then works with all the communities around that natural resource to design soil and moisture conservation and habitat restoration plans. Bringing them together, Jagdeesh assists communities to optimally use provisions of affirmative legislation such as the recently-enacted Forest Rights Act, to claim community rights to access, use, protect and manage forests and forest produce that they have traditionally had a right to. Based on the administrative category of the land, his organization – Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) assists in strengthening and building local institutions and cultivates a set of local volunteers to take on the stewardship of the area. This enables better representation and articulation of the interests of these local communities.

Securing tenure over land, recognizing local self-regulatory institutions, and making financial investments for restoration often result in local initiatives on better management of forests and pastures for improving agriculture. This intervention by FES has also resulted in triggering collective decision making on crop choices by considering groundwater as a common property, and nurturing pollinator and pest predator habitats for improving crop productivity. Besides scaling up such measures, FES also plays an equally important role towards sensitizing the government and research functionaries to integrate a ‘systems thinking’ and screen their sector-based programs for any unintended and undesirable consequences in other domains.

The Tragedy of the Commons refers to the depletion of a shared resource by individuals acting independently and rationally, according to one’s self-interest, despite knowing that an abuse of the common resource is contrary to those individuals’ long-term, best interests.  The first use of the term is attributed to the American ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Science article (first outlined in an 1833 pamphlet by W. F. Lloyd) describing European farmers practice of sharing common land on which they could graze their cattle. It is in each herder’s interest to put every cow he acquires on the land, even if the quality of the commons is damaged for all through overgrazing. The individual receives all of the benefits from any additional cow, but damage to the commons is shared by the group. The Tragedy is often applied to a discussion of environmental issues and is a model for a great variety of society’s current resource-based problems, including over-irrigation, habitat destruction, over-fishing, and traffic congestion.

Forests represent the second largest land use in India after agriculture, covering 23.57% of the overall landmass of 378 million hectares. Local people depend significantly on forests and other common lands for fuel wood, fodder, timber, forage, food, drinking water for animals and other household requirements. About 275 million of the country’s rural poor in India depend on forests for at least part of their subsistence, with the collection and processing of Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) alone estimated to be worth between USD 208 million to 645 million per annum. Important ecological functions such as improved transfer of nutrients, retention of moisture for a longer period, improved pollination, and pest control directly help improve farm productivity and incomes.

Despite their criticality, forests across India are besieged – previously inaccessible areas are now open to exploitation, and subsistence hunting and gathering in forests has given way to large-scale extraction of forest resources and produce so as to cater to industrial and distant market demands. While we are yet to fully comprehend how the various cycles of elements, natural, geo-chemical, biological and physical processes are interconnected, we are beginning to see the costs that would be imposed upon us, should these connections be disrupted and rendered beyond repair. For instance, the serious and alarming rate of groundwater depletion in India has resulted in around 75% of India’s dryland districts being declared “dark zones” meaning post monsoon water levels in the aquifers are inadequate to sustain farming practices until the next monsoon season, (hence the push to shift farmer incomes away from volume/production target-based farming).

While the majority of this common land is owned and operated by the government, communities that live around it have customary practices and rituals to look after it. Without any formal tenure rights or legal recognition of the land however, there is no incentive for the communities to maintain them, despite the importance they play. The tragedy at the heart of this situation is the fact that governments have a lack of belief in the community’s ability to be custodians and stewards of the land, often choosing the short term economically viable option, giving it to industries to destroy completely.

Though it may seem a very utilitarian view, forests and other commons need to be maintained for the ecological functions they serve, services they provide, the biodiversity they harbor, and to mitigate the harmful effects of greenhouse gases. In more direct terms, forests need to be sustained to protect our agriculture and water requirements. Developmental efforts to improve a given area, often administered by different arms of the government, tend to be fragmented or piecemeal and at times even work at cross-purposes, giving rise to further complexities. Regimes of conservation and use of forests, grazing lands, and water bodies therefore call for umbrella institutional arrangements that span across habitation and administrative domains and are sensitive to customary means of use and access.

Recognising that the vast majority of common lands sit in unique geographical regions, with unique cultural norms, Jagdeesh has built an adaptable model which puts the onus of the future of commons in the hands of the communities, bringing together principles of self-governance, community cohesion and justice.

In 1986, Jagdeesh was part of a pilot project on Tree Growers Cooperatives (TGCP) by the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB). Jagdeesh was responsible for project design and conceptualization in the first year, this brought him face-to-face with the political and bureaucratic hurdles that face rural India. While engaged in this work from 1986-1994, he began to see the pitfalls of the model, the cooperative system itself required to make profits, which was put into the natural landscape – cut the tree and sell it, only then it is a successful cooperative. This is when he moved away from the cooperatives project and founded Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) in 2001.

Jagdeesh starts his intervention by identifying a piece of natural resource which has been degraded over time, such as forests, grasslands, or water bodies. FES conducts extensive studies of the area around the degraded land, the communities around it, and completes an analysis of why the land is in the situation that it is. Once the study is concluded, Jagdeesh engages local organizations who already have trust with communities living around the natural resource and brings them all together. Depending on their level of awareness of the role that the common lands play in their lives and larger natural ecosystems, FES conducts capacity building workshops to help the community members understand their importance even if they do not directly use it.

Bringing them together, Jagdeesh assists communities to optimally use provisions of affirmative legislation such as the recently-enacted Forest Rights Act, to claim community rights to access, use, protect and manage forests and forest produce that they have traditionally had a right to.

There are 3 types of claim forms that can be filed through FRA – Form A (individual claim), Form B (resource rights) and Form C (community resource rights – govern and protect). There are various steps which are then followed in the communities for land rights:

1. A notice is issued to discuss village resource rights, following which a meeting is held with the gram panchayat to form a Forest Rights Committee. At least five women have to be a part of this committee. The committee is entitled to process the forest rights application.

2. The village organizes a meeting to fill forms B & C. Form B – grazing rights, NTFP rights, fish, wood, fruits, rights on diversity (medicinal plants), is signed by every household along with two testimonials from elders living in the village for 15+ years and a map of the area.

3. A joint meeting with neighboring villages is then held for an agreement on no contesting claims.

4. Joint verification by Revenue and Forest Department officials.

5. Final Gram Sabah meeting is held, and a complete minute of the meeting are taken. A copy of this is submitted to the sub-level committee, verification by officials is done and then submitted to district level committee for approval.

The 73rd Amendment to the Constitution and the Forests Rights Act recognize the strengths of local self-governance in managing and governing resources. Besides placing rural citizens as determinants of their futures, the enactments enable local communities to act collectively. Such collective action is best placed to understand local context, quick to respond and is cost effective. Though facing erosion, in several places, rural communities have customary rules and practices to manage and govern shared natural resources. FES aids communities to nest such local institutions within Panchayats to gain formal recognition, and secure legal rights on forests, pastures and water bodies and revive rules and regulations to govern and manage them.

Jagdeesh works with all the communities around that natural resource to design soil and moisture conservation and habitat restoration plans. FES promotes dialogue within rural communities on ecological thresholds, thereby triggering regulation on injudicious practices such as water intensive cropping and over extraction of forest produce. As forests, pastures and water bodies transgress human settlements and require inter-village cooperation, FES works with contiguous villages and helps build institutional apparatus for debate and dialogue at a block or landscape level.

FES also set up Prakriti Karyashala (Rural College) to respond to the learning needs of rural communities, village institutions, Panchayats, non-government organizations and block/district government officials, who can steer processes at the village level and aid the development of their region in areas of local governance and stewardship of natural resources. The Colleges work closely with government programs and institutions to provide large-scale, cost-effective, and quality learning opportunities. The Colleges are now in operation in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Odisha. Experiential learning methods are employed in the form of sequential training modules combined with field-level application, to reinforce learning outcomes. The modules include filing claims on community lands, effective planning, and implementation of natural resource management through the national rural employment government scheme, strengthening the capacities of Panchayats and accessing social security benefits. The focus is to enhance local stewardship, improve rigor of action and build skills to bridge local practice and program imperatives. To accelerate the engagement on the ground to restore degraded landscapes and build robust collective action institutions, the Karyashala is honing the capacities of a strong rural cadre through partnerships with NGOs, Milk Unions and Government bodies.

FES also worked with the Government of Rajasthan to revisit the decade old definition of ‘cattle head’ to include small ruminants, allowing ‘revenue wastelands’ to be reclassified as pastures under the custody of Panchayats . The village communities in Rajasthan are presenting the latest livestock population to the district administration for conversion of ‘revenue wastelands’ to pastureland. In partnership with the Pastureland and Wastelands Development Board of Rajasthan government, village level committees for pasture management are being formed in 10 districts which would bring 3 million acres of pastures and revenue wastelands under improved tenure and governance.

Jagdeesh realized the emerging threats from biofuels which would change the whole landscape along with special economic zones and a threat from different policies. FES was approached by the International Association for Study of Commons and hosted the International Conference on Commons in January 2011. Following this conference, they started working with three state governments – Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan. FES also drafted the commons policy for Rajasthan at the time. After the conference, the visibility of FES increased, and they received various awards (like the Times of India Best NGO [envt.]).

Impact assessment studies indicate that secure land rights coupled with strong local governance and restoration efforts have helped in addressing issues of food and water security. With improved water availability farmers are able to provide critical irrigation to their crops and take on secondary crops that helps them meet their domestic food requirement for an additional three months on an average.

Through their ecological restoration work, FES impacts communities by improving soil moisture which in turn has an impact on better and quicker growth of forest cover and better growth of fodder leading to an increase in milk supply and increase in goat/sheep numbers. Increased water availability ensures stability for primary crops and water for livestock. Improved forest cover and soil moisture aids in fixing the carbon issue, locking up carbon in the forests and in the soil with vegetation.

During its initial 15 years, FES brought together 28 NGOs to implement a program in 14 districts of undivided Andhra Pradesh, brought together academicians, policy makers, and funded and worked with 7 networks – ground water, NGOs, coastal waters, pastoralists, knowledge commons and urban commons through the International Conference on Commons. As of June 2019, FES has worked with 20,290 villages across 10 ecological regions of India, restoring 6.3 million acres of common lands and impacting the lives of 11 million people. With an ambitious aim of restoring 30 million acres of common lands in the next five years, FES aims to scale their work to 100,000 villages through collaborations with various local NGOs, government partnerships, and partnerships with researchers, practitioners and changemakers. By creating a collective platform and exchange forums, FES wants to elevate the debate around commons and give a voice to the issues of the degradation of common lands by developing products that can start a debate in the country – like documentaries, promise of commons portal (status, maps, dependency), status of commons series, and reference manuals.

Jagdeesh was born in in Andhra Pradesh while finishing his schooling and undergraduate degree in Agricultural Sciences from Baroda, Gujarat. He then went on to study Rural Management from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand and Forestry for Rural Management in the Netherlands.

It was during his work with TGCP in 1986 that he began to get into the politics of land, understanding the dynamics of ownership of land and power struggles around land. While with TGCP, the core of the work he was doing was arranging land from government and passing it to the villages to help manage and protect them. While doing this he realized that the villagers were strongly disproving the theory of tragedy of commons when the land was brought under their management.

While engaged in this work between 1986-1994, Jagdeesh also started seeing the pitfalls of the model. The Zamindar system was still prominent at the time and so the higher profile people got together and excluded the villagers. Put into the natural landscape, the cooperative system itself required to make profits – cut the tree and sell it, only then it is a successful cooperative.

It was then that Jagdeesh moved away from the cooperatives project and founded FES in 2001. After having been with FES for over 2 decades, Jagdeesh has now moved out of the administration work at FES and is part of the FES Steering Committee. He is now working on setting up another organization, Common Ground, to implement the ecosystem building approach aiming to give villagers voice, power, access and control over their own futures.