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Punjab women make living out of their backyard greens, conserve it too
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SME Times News Bureau | 27 Mar, 2021
Sudarshna Devi has changed. "Changed for good," the 72-year-old says, in
Punjabi, with a chuckle. Until 2003, the Class 8 dropout used to cover
her face in ghoonghat and would barely step out of her home without a
male company. Cooking, fetching water, raising children, rearing the
cattle, her time was spent performing these household chores.
But
today, Sudarshna walks with an air of confidence -- minus the ghoonghat
and an entourage of men. She owes this confidence to the scrub forest
in her ‘backyard' in Dhar Kalan block of Punjab's Pathankot district,
where she stays. She collects medicinal plants from the forest and sells
them to local traders. "Last year, I made Rs 1.5 lakh," she tells us
proudly.
Like Sudarshna, the lives of close to 300 women in this
block have transformed since they started making a livelihood from
agro-forestry. The forest they go to has also benefited in return.
PLPA restricted forest use
The
forest stands on the border of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh and falls in
the Lower Shivaliks range of hills. It is 10 to 15 minutes of walk from
most of the 31 villages that fall under the Dhar Kalan block. But
despite the proximity, the residents could not make a living from this
forest for close to a century.
This stems from the complicated history of this forest land.
Dhar
Kalan block is governed under The Punjab Land Preservation Act, which
the British had introduced in 1905. Called PLPA in short, the Act banned
all commercial and livelihood activities to arrest soil erosion and
flash floods. Villagers could collect firewood and timber for personal use with the permission of forest officials but they could not plough this land.
Dhar
Kalan has some parcel of panchayat land for farming but the majority is
PLPA forest land, spread across 15,771 hectares. As a result, most men
in Dhar Kalan work as daily-wage labourers while women manage homes.
It
was only in 2010 when the Punjab government started withdrawing the
land under PLPA so as to relax a few restrictions earlier imposed by the
forest department and make it eligible for common use. This step opened
up livelihood opportunities for the communities living close to the
forest.
As a result, 8,599.72 hectares of forest land in Dhar
Kalan was withdrawn. This patch is now jointly managed by the villagers
and the forest department.
‘It gives us income'
The women
of Dhar Kalan started to make a living from the withdrawn forest patch
in 2017. Thanks to a project started by the Punjab Forest Department
under the aegis of the National Medicinal Plant Board (NMPB). The
project aims to employ women in the processing and sale of herbs
collected from the local forest.
It was Sunita, a social
development facilitator with the state forest department who goes only
by her first name, who mobilised these women to come out and work. Most
of these women did face resistance from the men and elders in their
family initially. But when extra income started trickling in, these
families saw value in this initiative.
Sunita's intervention in
Dhar Kalan started in 2003 when she organised women into self-help
groups to sell locally-grown fruits and products like aam papad. This
was part of the Punjab Afforestation Project.
Later, when the
project to harvest medicinal plants was announced, she trained these
women to pick plants like giloy, amla, neem, amaltas, gandla, basuti and
bhabbar and operate machines to make juices and powders.
Krishna
Devi, a 36-year-old from Mothwan village, admits that she joined the
project "after seeing the kind of money it brought (sic)." Today,
Krishna and her farmer-husband have been able to build a home of their
own, partly because of her income, she shares happily.
The
intervention has not only brought them money but also given them social
mobility and agency. The practice of ghoonghat is on the decline because
they have to go to the market and interact with traders in the city of
Amritsar on a frequent basis. Women such as Sudarshna and Krishna have
gone from being members of the self-help groups to taking on the role of
a mentor.
Since this is a part-time vocation and women have
household chores to do as well, they take on the tasks as and when they
are free. However, tasks are cut out between different age-groups.
"Older women are responsible for boiling berries such as amla and
extracting juice, younger ones head out to the forest to collect them,"
Krishna says.
‘They help conserve the forest'
The project
has given the forest department more reasons to cheer about. Pathankot
Divisional Forest Officer Sanjeev Tewari informs 101Reporters, "They
(these women) inform us about fires breaking out in the forest. They
have also alerted us about poachers a few times and individuals
encroaching the land. Their participation has helped us in conserving
the forest."
Their vigilance is significant because "the number
of unemployed youths in this area [Lower Shivaliks] is very high and
they are likely to be easily lured in unlawful activities like poaching,
illicit felling," cites a forest management plan prepared for the
Pathankot forest division in 2015. The forests in Punjab need to be
protected on a priority basis also because their cover is low in the
first place, spanning only six per cent, Tewari informs.
These
women don't go into the forest with the prime motive of patrolling but
when they do see any suspicious activity, they call up "Sunita ma'am" as
soon as possible, Krishna tells us.
Since these women have taken
up this vocation to generate income, could it lead to greed and
over-exploitation of the forest? The Dhar Kalan patch is a thriving
habitat of the wolf, clawless otter, leopard, panther, blackbuck, Indian
gazelle, pangolin and other wildlife species.
No, says Sunita.
She explains, "The NMPB scheme not only aims to generate livelihood but
also promote in-situ conservation of medicinal plants. So we have
trained them to survey and document important medicinal plants in their
natural habitat. This way we make sure we don't harvest certain plants
excessively. They have also been told to identify and report the
invasive species."
As a parting question, we ask Sunita why women
were chosen for this project and not men. "Because they wore ghoonghat
and stayed in," says Sunita, implying that a little incentive right in
the ‘backyard' can boost the self-confidence and social standing of the
women.
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