Every year, around April, as the summer approaches, Mohammad Sehan and his family migrate with their sheep, goats and buffaloes from their home in Himachal Pradesh’s Chamba district, to the higher ranges in the district, where his livestock grazes on alpine pastures.
Then, by September, just as the chill starts to set in, his family begins the return journey, sometimes moving further to lower plains and foothills of Punjab for winter fodder. It is a route that many in his Gujjar community are well versed with, one that has been traversed by many generations.
In recent years, however, lands from these routes have been diverted, not just for roads and hydroprojects, but also for plantation activities by the forest department. “There used to be empty areas for us to tie our buffaloes and rest for the night,” Sehan said. “Now those areas have been diverted. We end up taking rest on the roads, which has also resulted in losses of our livestock and men due to accidents.”
A letter written in January by Himachal Pradesh’s top forest officer has brought into focus this longstanding tension between afforestation efforts in the state and the needs and rights of its pastoral communities.
In the letter, dated January 24, the state’s principal chief conservator of forest directed all divisional forest officers in the state to avoid tree planting under any schemes in “areas that serve as migratory routes or halting sites for pastoral communities”.
Experts have welcomed the forest department’s move, but they have also raised some concerns about it.
For instance, Manshi Asher, cofounder of the Palampur-based Himdhara Environment Research and Action Collective, argued that the letter is limited in that it does not use any “existing legal framework like the Forest Rights Act” to guarantee rights of use for pastoralists. “A comprehensive order that makes consent of gram sabha and graziers mandatory before carrying out plantations would be more effective,” Asher said.
This criticism is particularly relevant given that the Forest Rights Act, 2006, vests nomadic and pastoralist communities with the rights to access seasonal resources in forests like alpine pastures.
“If we get the community forest rights, it will save our traditional occupation, which is slowly disappearing now,” Sehan said. “Our grazing grounds will remain open to us and we will have guaranteed rights to our migratory paths.”
Similarity to earlier letter
Appended to the January letter was a list of around 1,600 locations in the state through which shepherds either pass or halt, along with the GPS coordinates of the locations. The letter suggests that the forest department “avoid all these areas for plantations as that will result either in loss of these plantations or loss of grazing resources for graziers”.
It also directed that efforts “should be made to involve these communities in decision-making, particularly if there is a need to divert lands under migratory grazing for plantation or infrastructure purposes”.
For instance, it said, plantation programmes “can be conducted in consultation with pastoral communities ensuring their migratory routes and halting locations are understood and mapped”.
The letter bears similarities to a 2022 “technical order” from the Chamba district’s forest department, which made recommendations along the same lines to protect the rights of Gaddi and Gujjar communities who are present in large numbers in the district.
Pastoralists and experts who work with them welcome the move to expand such directives to the entire state. “This letter reiterates the provisions of the 2022 letter, emphasising the need to include pastoralists in forest department decision-making processes,” said Aniruddh Sheth, research coordinator at the Centre for Pastoralism.
Sheth has been working with Gaddi, Gujjar, Kanet and Kinnaura pastoralists across Himachal Pradesh to map pastoralist routes. In fact, the forest department relied on coordinates mapped by the Centre for Pastoralism in both its 2022 and the recent letter, to highlight routes that pastoral communities used.
“This is a critical and potentially the most significant outcome of the letter, as it applies across the entire state,” Sheth said.
Why afforestation can create conflict
Experts have raised concerns about pastoralists’ rights in the context of earlier plantation programmes in the state also.
Himachal Pradesh has seen several state and central level afforestation programmes over the years, such as a World-Bank-supported social forestry project and the Indo-German Integrated Dhauladhar project, both of which were started in the 1980s.
It has also seen a scheme that was participatory in nature, known as Van Lagao Rozi Kamao, started in 1992. Under this scheme, the forest department assigned residents belonging to the “below poverty line” category with two hectares of land, on which they would protect and take care of saplings. A caretaker would be awarded a remuneration based on the survival rates of a plantation. In 1998, the forest department also started projects under the Joint Forest Management scheme, which was based on community participation in managing forests.
From 2016 onwards, the most prominent afforestation scheme was the central compensatory afforestation scheme, under which proponents of various infrastructure projects would be required to plant new saplings to compensate for the deforestation they carried out for the project.
Researchers and pastoralists say that all these plantation activities have led to restrictions on migration through traditional routes through forests and high-altitude pastures.
In many instances, this was because the species of trees planted did not suit pastoralists. A 2020 study analysed afforestation policies between 1960 and 2017 around three panchayats in Kangra district. It found that the proportion of trees that were “palatable” to livestock had declined over time – from 28% in the 1980s to 20% between 2009 and 2015. Further, it found that of the 64 plantation sites studied, 36 had no trees prior to the afforestation plantations and were used exclusively as pastures.
Plantations under various schemes also led to problems because in the early years of the saplings, they were usually fenced for protection, restricting pastoralists’ access to plants on the sites that their animals could graze on. “This leads to uncertainty in which areas along the route will become closed in the future, influencing mobility decisions,” the researchers noted.
Mohammad Sehan, the pastoralist, who is also a member of the Chamba Van Adhikar Manch in Chamba district, said, “In the last decade or so, we have found several changes in our migratory routes.”
A 2022 research project evaluated more than 2,000 plantations in the state by analysing relevant government documents from between 2016 and 2019. The researchers found that one-third of the state’s spending on afforestation was on sites that had such “contested land tenure”.
The problem of afforestation with trees that did not suit pastoralists was also raised in a 2022 meeting of the state’s grazing advisory committee, which reviews grazing policies of the state. At the meeting, non-governmental representatives raised concerns about such plantation projects, highlighting in particular the planting of sagwan trees while afforesting grazing areas.
According to the minutes of the meeting, they noted that the tree’s “leaves upon falling cover the grazing grass leading to a scarcity of fodder” for sheep and goats. Instead, they suggested that “broad-leaved trees” be planted in grazing areas, or “bushes or plants that can be consumed by livestock”. It was in response to these and other concerns raised in this meeting that the January letter was issued.
Precedence for use of forest land
Experts are particularly disappointed in the absence of a statutory framework for the January letter because the state has seen the use of such a framework in the past.
In 2022, the district level committee of Kangra, formed under the Forest Rights Act, recognised the community forest rights of three panchayats in Kangra’s Chota Bhangal under the act. Specifically it recognised their right to use forest land for pastoralism and grazing. But such examples have been rare.
Sehan explained that one of the problems that pastoral communities face is that the revenue department and forest departments do not cooperate with them to provide documents they need as proof to show that they have been using certain migratory routes for generations, or that they have been using certain tracts of forest land for agriculture. “Even today, I have some 250 to 300 files of individual forest right applications with me,” he said. But, he added, the applications have not yet been completed because the applicants lack crucial documents. As a result, these claims have not reached the higher sub-divisional and district level authorities to be verified.
Some experts are also concerned that the January letter refers to only herders of sheep and goats, typically members of the Kanet and Gaddi pastoralist groups. “There is no explicit mention of buffalo herders,” says Pranav Menon, a graduate student at the department of anthropology in the University of Minnesota, who works with Van Gujjars in the Himalayas. Menon explained that buffaloes are also commonly reared by Gujjar pastoralists.
Excluding some kinds of herders while making policies would be unfair to them, Menon argued, since different groups had different practices and needs.
For instance, he explained that buffalo herders have a practice known as lopping, wherein they prune trees in winter months to gather fodder, at the same time ensuring that the trees regenerate. Lopping has been recognised since colonial times and rules were laid down with regard to what species could be lopped and to what extent. By only focusing on goats and sheep, Menon argued, the letter protects the practices of a few communities and excludes several others.
