Why locals are more likely to fight some forest fires in Uttarakhand than others

The forests of Uttarakhand are burning. According to the latest data released by the state government, Uttarakhand has witnessed more than 900 incidents of forest fires this year alone. These fires have burned more than 1,200 hectares of forests. According to this data, four people have died in the fires so far.

Over the last week, the state’s forest department, and the Indian Air Force and Army worked to douse almost 30 forest fires in the Nainital division alone. Other divisions have also seen forest fires this year – 157 hectares of forest burned in Pithoragarh, and 105 hectares in Tarai East.

Initially, the forest department had arrested some locals on suspicion of intentionally starting fires. But Koko Rosé, a conservator of forests in the state, noted that after officials looked into the matter, they realised that these fires had been accidental. He explained that wheat in Uttarakhand is harvested in March, after which farmers burn the stubble to prepare the fields for a new harvest. If these fires are not controlled and doused after the stubble is burned, they can spread to forests. “Very few of these are criminal cases,” he said. Last week, a video began to circulate of two individuals who claimed to be from Bihar, and to have set off a fire raging behind them – on Saturday, Uttarakhand Police arrested three individuals in connection with the matter.

While the fires have brought into focus the immense vulnerability of the state’s forest lands, they have also shed light on another dimension of the problem: that local communities are far more involved in protecting forests in some areas than others.

The reason for the skew is not hard to discern. The forest department manages 26.5 lakh hectares of reserved forests, to which communities’ access is controlled, while more than 7 lakh hectares of the state’s forests are managed by van panchayats. These are village-level administration units that run in parallel to village panchayats and draw powers from the Van Panchayat Act of 1931, which granted them a high degree of autonomy in using and maintaining managing forests in their vicinity. These institutions are unique to Uttarakhand – currently, the state has more than 12,000 such van panchayats.

“Of course, forest fires do not understand boundaries between reserved forests or van panchayats,” said Mallika Virdi, a former sarpanch of Sirmoli Van Panchayat in Munsiyari. “But in places where communities have rights to manage their forests and have close dependence to the forests, people rush to extinguish fires immediately.” She added that “for reserved forests, since the forest department manages it through their employees, forest guards and rangers, communities do not feel that the forest belongs to them, and so they do not participate in extinguishing it.”

Rosé agreed that involving communities is “the most important” aspect of forest fire management. This is particularly true of a mountain state like Uttarakhand, where government staffers may face delays in reaching the sites of fires. “Sometimes, even after a 15 km drive, we have to go 4-5 km on foot to reach the fire site,” Rosé said. “By then, the fire has spread a lot.”

In such situations, contributions from locals to manage fires in time becomes crucial. “We have had excellent contributions from women who help douse fires, especially in oak forests,” he said. “There, people participate with enthusiasm because it’s very important for cattle fodder. They are directly dependent on the forest.”

Prevention and firefighting

Communities do not just respond to fires when they break out – rather, from February onwards each year, they also engage in activities that can prevent their spread.

For instance, they clear dry bushes and fallen pine needles of the chir pine, both of which ignite easily. The chir pine presents a particular risk – the trees cover 28% of Uttarakhand’s forested area, and burn much more quickly than broad-leaved trees. This is due to the high concentration of resin in the pine needles and twigs, which makes them “burn like petrol”, said Yogender Pal, sarpanch of the Soangoan van panchayat.

“Communities collect it for making cattle’s bedding to be used in cowsheds,” explained Bhuvan Singh Sharma, a supervisor at the Institute of Himalayan Environmental Research and Education India, an organisation based in Almora’s Chinoni village. “Pine trees shed these needles in early months of the year, so they need to be constantly monitored.”

Locals and experts Scroll spoke to noted that most van panchayat forests were mixed – apart from the dominant chir pine, many also are home to oak trees, rhododendron and semal, and fruit trees like kayaphal, all of which are broad-leaved trees. These trees serve as important sources of minor forest produce, wood, and fodder – because of this, communities often visit forests that have these trees, and monitor them regularly.

When it comes to fighting fires, communities lack equipment like vehicles and leaf blowers, which clear paths of dry leaves – despite this, they manage to control fires using more basic materials and techniques. For instance, in April, even as the forest department and Indian Army were dousing fires that were spreading close to prominent landmarks in Nainital, like the High Court colony, residents of the village of Soangaon in the same district were dousing a fire on their van panchayat land.

“On the first day, we got to know that a fire had started at around 11 am, so we rushed to douse it,” said Yogender Pal. He, along with a few women from the village, arrived at the spot and started hitting the weaker flames with broken tree branches, an action that helps cut oxygen supply to a fire, and thus extinguishes it. They then cleared inflammable dry grass and pine needles from the area surrounding the fire, to make “fire lines” – by introducing gaps of about 4 feet in the path of fires, these cleared strips prevent them from spreading.

Such measures can be critical given that government authorities do not have the capacity to respond to all fires.“We called the forest ranger, but he said that all their efforts were diverted towards Nainital at the moment,” said Pal. “They kept saying we will be there soon but did not show up.”

Rosé agreed that when multiple fires break out, the forest department has to make the “unfortunate call of prioritising which fire to respond to first”.

The importance of the community’s role in managing forests is evident from the fact that in places where they have grown less dependent on forests, fires tend to spread rapidly. Deepak Pachhai, a young resident of Sarmoli village in Pithoragarh district, noted that in the neighbouring Shankdhura van panchayat, for instance, grass that would earlier be collected as fodder for cattle and stored during winter months, was not collected in 2023 because “people are moving away from livestock rearing”. The dry grass left in the forest led to intense fires, which Pachhai and other members controlled with fire lines.

A slow dilution of van panchayat’s autonomy

Van panchayat members explained that in recent years, their powers to manage forests, and concomitantly, take preventive measures against fires, had been hampered by the forest department’s increased control over the forests.

This has resulted from a set of amendments made to the Van Panchayat Act between 1976 and 2005. Among the most significant changes made to the law was one under which van panchayats were mandated to create “micro plans” and submit them to the forest department for approval. This hampered the autonomy of governance that the panchayats earlier enjoyed.

Pal noted, for instance, that he submitted a suggestion under a micro plan to the forest department to gradually cut chir pine trees and plant more broad-leaved trees in Soangaon’s forests – however, he added,discussions on the matter had not progressed much. “See, this is the problem,” Pal said. “Despite being a van panchayat, our decisions are made final only after the forest department agrees to it.”

Lack of funds to Van Panchayats

In recent years, Uttarakhand has allocated funds for forest fire management, under several heads, including a “forest fire protection scheme” and a “forest fire prevention and management scheme”. In the financial year 2023, for instance, the state allocated Rs 6.3 crore to van panchayats and Rs 15.8 crore to reserved forests under the “fire protection scheme”.

But sarpanches argued that they did not receive funds consistently. “There is a lot of budget allocated for the van panchayats for forest fire fighting,” said Tarun Joshi, coordinator of Van Panchayat Sangharsh Samiti. “But these are first transferred to the forest department, who then transfer it to panchayats of their choosing.”

Joshi added that it was not clear on what basis these choices were made. “If these funds are meant for van panchayats, then why are they not being channelled to all of them directly?” Joshi said. “They all have bank accounts.”

He added that this inconsistent and opaque process of transferring funds had led to “a lot of grudges between sarpanches whose panchayats have received the funds and those who have not”.

Among the ways in which a lack of funds has become a problem is in the employment of “fire watchers”, residents of villages who monitor their forests and quickly inform and alert other residents in case of a fire.

Joshi noted that many fire watchers were owed wages by the government. “So many fire watchers have left because of untimely payments,” he said.

Virdi recounted that during her term as a sarpanch, the forest department started directly paying fire watchers from the village – she insisted that the funds be transferred to the account of the van panchayat first. “We believed this would give us more ownership of the funds, and we could then decide who from the village would volunteer, instead of the forest department choosing them,” she said. The department did not accede to this demand.

Experts maintain that for the long-term management of fires, van panchayats needed to be strengthened. “Active participation of people with dignity and not just as labour, and in particular, validating their rights to forests, would reinstate the relationship they had with forests where it is beginning to dwindle,” said Neema Pathak Broome, coordinator of Conservation and Livelihoods program with Pune-based environmental group Kalpavriksh. Broome added that such an approach becomes particularly important because dry weather and heat in the Western Himalayas is expected to rise, making conditions conducive for such fires.

Further, Broome explained that despite the dilution of van panchayats’ powers over the years, villages could also claim rights over forests under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which states, for instance, that “holders of any forest right are empowered to protect wildlife, forest, and biodiversity”. Thus, a village sarpanch like Pal would be able to implement a plan to plant broad-leaved trees to replace pines in a forest, which would, in turn, reduce the village’s vulnerability to fires.

However, Uttarakhand is among the poorest-performing states when it comes to implementing the act – between 2006 and February this year, village-level forest right committees had submitted more than 3,000 community forest right claims, of which, only one has been granted.