Session 9. 1. B.

Nature conservation has been an integral part of Indian society since time immemorial. The notion of ‘sacred’ has been used to express the utmost importance of the natural resources. For instance, there are sacred plants that cannot be harmed, sacred animals that cannot be poached and sacred rivers that must not be polluted. Similarly, there are Sacred Groves spread all over India (and globally) that are preserved and protected by the indigenous communities through their unique socio-cultural practices that run across generations. They are the sites of communal stewardship showing pathways of sustainable futures and respect for the natural world.
Sacred Groves are known by different names in India. In Rajasthan, they are called Orans. Being an arid state, Orans are the green oasis in this desert state. The indigenous communities of Rajasthan play a key role in maintaining and conserving these Sacred Groves. These communities are dependent on the Groves culturally, socially and economically as well. They collect grass, dry wood and wild berries from the Orans and even take their cattle to graze on these sites. This qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic study highlights the cultural practices embedded in the everyday lives of tribal communities in Rajasthan to show how the culture of the tribals is intricately linked to nature conservation hence making them the experts of climate resilience.
This paper also discusses the process of ‘Institutional Bricolage’ in the domain of natural resource governance and how this approach can help in better understanding the hybrid dialogue between the formal institutions of ecological conservation and informal elements of people’s agency, situatedness and power relations within the community. In conclusion, this paper argues that identifying and acknowledging the different socio-cultural beliefs and practices of the local communities, alongside formal rules and regulations, is crucial for managing and conserving Sacred Groves of India and beyond.

The recent scholarship on commons argues that every common should have clearly defined boundaries and institutional arrangements to regulate the rights of the beneficiaries. Determining boundaries for commons includes terms like ‘demarcation’ or ‘enclosures’, which have multiple meanings and applications, particularly in forestland. The history of colonial forestland in India speaks about the demarcation of hectares of forests as reserved or protected forests, primarily achieved by expelling all the forest-dependent communities without any settlement of customary rights. With the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, the Indian Government introduced the provision of recording Community Forest Resources (CFR) to address the ‘historical injustice’ faced by the Scheduled Tribes and other forest-dwelling communities since the colonial demarcation of forests and the subsequent control by the Forest Department. However, the process of demarcating the boundaries of CFR under FRA (2006) has faced multiple contestations among different stakeholders like the Forest Department, the Gram Sabhas (village councils formed under FRA 2006), the Forest Protection Committees and the people who have accessed the forests without any institutional acknowledgement. Based on ethnographic studies undertaken in phases in the Ajodhya Pahar Hill Range of Eastern India, the current paper has tried to show how the process of demarcating the forest commons has been severely contested between several institutions and groups, despite the state itself mandating the regulation and demarcation of CFR by the concerned Gram Sabhas formed under FRA (2006).

Landscapes hold memories, they tell stories of place and people through their spatial histories
and relational geographies. Salt pan lands of the once colonial city of Bombay, now Mumbai,
trace the violence of colonization and the voice of India’s freedom struggle through the salt
satyagraha. Ironically, these very memoryscapes that epitomize the representation of India’s
freedom, continue to remain postcolonial spaces of oppression, warranting the question -
freedom for whom? In this article, I make visible the ‘unfreedom’ of three communities interacting with Mumbai’s salt pans - the kolis, agaris, and adivasis while drawing on Amartya Sen’s provocations of ‘unfreedom’ - poverty and tyranny. This research analyzes interviews, archival and court documents to critique the colonial epistemologies that fix land and fragment resources on these fluid ecologies. Mumbai’s salt pan lands offer a charged site to study the caste, class dynamics of the tiller and landlord that continue untouched post-independence as colonial categorization of these lands under the ambit of ‘industry’ omit them from land reforms. The article concludes that the nexus of the State, developers and judiciary, continues to perpetuate these epistemologies with strategic change in land-use policy and probes a re-imaging of freedom in a planning process inspired by Amartya Sen’s 'Development as Freedom. '

In recent decades, the rapid loss of biodiversity has become a global concern. A significant portion of the world’s biodiversity, concentrated in the Global South, is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic pressures such as land use change, degradation, urbanization, overexploitation, pollution, and climate change. These pressures are further exacerbated by weak governance, political instability, unrestricted economic growth, and fluctuations in international commodity markets. Additionally, countries in the Global South grapple with the legacies of colonialism, power imbalances in resource ownership, and the extraction of natural and land resources.

The establishment of protected areas (PAs) has been a fundamental aspect of conservation efforts, beginning with Yosemite National Park in 1864 in the USA. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines protected areas as “clearly defined geographical spaces, recognized, dedicated, and managed through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature along with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.” Many of these biologically diverse ecosystems are inhabited by traditional and indigenous communities.

In this research, I introduce the key concerns regarding reduced access to natural resources due to conservation projects in India, particularly as faced by tribal groups and women living within the Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal. I aim to employ the frameworks of environmental justice, intersectionality, and political ecology to address the justice concerns associated with protected areas in India. Conservation efforts undertaken by several countries have often resulted in extensive displacement and relocation, adversely impacting local tribal populations. However, these actions have been justified on the grounds of biodiversity conservation and are largely omitted from the dispossession literature (Lasgorceix et al., 2009).

While there is scholarship addressing land dispossession in India, there exists a gap in the literature concerning the gendered impacts of such displacement, particularly in the context of reserve forests. Specifically, there is a lack of comparative analyses regarding the welfare consequences and overall sustainability of these conservation projects. An overview of the scholarly literature indicates that conservation and eco-development initiatives have further marginalized already disadvantaged populations in the name of ‘development.’