Management of Natural Resources through Co-Operative Action: A Case Study of Village Development Society in Gujarat, India

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Management of Natural Resources through
Co-Operative Action A Case Study of Village
Development Society in Gujarat, India

• Nimisha Shukla
• Paper presented at the Third Asia-Pacific
  Co-Operative Research Conference. Chaingmai,
  Thailand 30 November 2004.

There is enough for everyones need, but not
enough for anyones greed. -Mahatma Gandhi
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I Introduction Poverty alleviation and rural
development is the current development theme in
many developing countries including India. The
Green revolution strategy followed by the
government in the planning era in India has left
sufficient scars on the face of the earth in
terms overexploitation of ground water resources,
land degradation and pressure on forests and
common property resources especially in the arid
and semi arid regions. Even in hilly terrains of
humid regions the phenomenon of resource
degradation due to agricultural and development
planning strategies are now known. It was
expected that the development strategies would
substantially reduce the poverty in the rural
areas and also the efforts will be able to lead
to reduction in pressure on distressed migration
to the urban areas. In fact, the poverty has
deepened in some areas and many scholars have
brought up the issue of nexus between poverty and
natural resource degradation. The issue is how
would the societies come out of this lose -lose
situation. Are there any efforts that are
worthwhile examining and emulating for
restoration of both the livelihood of the poor
and the conservation of the environment? What are
roles of community and other institutions some of
which have strong historical antecedents in
conserving and managing the natural resources?
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I Introduction Cooperation and collective action
has been one of the major strategies in
conserving and managing land, water and community
and common property resources including forests.
The base was so strong and traditions were so
well grounded that in the post independence India
cooperative effort for rural development was used
as a dominant strategy. India has had an
impressive track record on the cooperative
efforts to undertake economic development. The
Anand Milk Union Limited (AMUL) is the world
level great success story and agriculture credit
has also been channelised mainly through the
village level primary cooperative society with
limited success. There is a need, however, to
learn from these experiments and make fresh
efforts to revitalise the cooperative
institutions because privatisation and individual
management of some these resources are not going
to yield to optimum and sustainable use. Without
the cooperation value rejuvenation of lost
communal and community resources appear
difficult. Recent voluntary initiatives in rural
development in India in general and in Gujarat in
particular have shown the way in this direction.
The present paper tries to document one such
experiment. The present short review suggests
that for sustainable management of natural
resources, collective action appears imperative.
In this regards, we propose to study the one of
many activities taken up by the Aga Khan Rural
Support Programme - India (AKRSP (I)) for NRM.
The activity we propose to examine is the working
of the Gram Vikas Mandals (GVMs).
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II. Rationale for Co-Operative Action As
majority of natural resources rest in the domain
of Common Property Resources (CPRs), even
de-facto, if not de-jury , the problem of their
management gets special attention. The term CPR
is defined as a natural or man-made resource
system with the characteristics of excludability
and rivalry (Gibbs and Bromley, 1989). Under
these circumstances, collective management of
CPRs becomes very important management question.
One of the major issues in management of CPRs is
free riding tendency. Free riding tendency is
associated with utilising the resource without
contributing anything for its sustainable
management. The prevalence of such tendency would
result into exploitation of resource without any
accountability. Hence, the issue becomes deciding
the ideal institutional arrangement to curb
and/or to minimise the free riding tendency.
Institutional arrangements are defined as the
rules and conventions that establish peoples
relationships to resources, translating interests
into claims and claims into property rights.
These relationships affect resource use pattern
to a significant extent. By the criteria of
efficiency, equity, resilience and
sustainability, the institutional performance of
each institution can be appraised.
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Indian Scenario In Indian context, the threat of
overexploitation of natural resources has existed
for long. During the British rule of two
centuries, Indias CPRs were appropriated, either
by force or by lease, for the selfish motives of
wealth creation for the British Empire. After
Independence, for achieving faster economic
growth, the economic policies pursued by the
government have little or no impact on the
development of natural resource base of the
country. The forest cover was lost significantly
it is only in the recent past that it has been
marginally recovered. There is a decline in the
size and status of common land resources due to
industrialisation and encroachment. The water
situation is very grim too. It becomes very
important to rethink the policy prescription for
management of these resources. What has worked or
has not worked and why so? How can the worked
ones be replicated? In India, as in other
developing countries, the government has
primarily sponsored cooperative system. The
cooperative movement began with the Indian
Cooperative Credit Societies Act. But the
cooperatives for Natural Resource Management
(NRM) are of recent origin. Land and forest
resource, irrigation and fisheries have
management practices that are cooperative in
arrangement. The formal management structures may
not be like textbook cooperatives, but draw more
from collective action models. What is important
and relevant is that the basic spirit is of
cooperation. Hence, the focus is on participatory
management by the stakeholders.
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III Aga Khan Rural Support Programme - India
AKRSP (I) Mission Statement AKRSP (I) exists
to enable the empowerment of rural communities
and groups, particularly the underprivileged and
women, to take control over their lives and
manage their environment, to create a better and
more equitable society. (AKRSP Annual Report,
2003) Improvement in the quality of life is
possible through sustainable development of
natural resources and at the same time human
resources have to be developed to manage and
sustain natural resources. The approach has been
resource and people centric. The community
participation in planning and implementing any
project for natural resource management has
higher probability to succeed.
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The Programmes 1. Enhancing agricultural
productivity and income ?Private Land
Development ? Water Management ? Micro
finance and Agricultural Marketing 2. Common
Land Development and Management ? Watershed
Development/ Fodder Development ? Joint Forest
Management 3. Enhancing income from off farm
activities 4. Drudgery reduction 5.
Outreach Programme Areas AKRSP (I) is currently
active in four distinct environmentally
challenged and economically vulnerable regions of
Gujarat state. They are ? Bharuch, Surat and
Narmada districts of South Gujarat ? Junagadh
and Surendranagar districts of Saurashtra ?
Kutch district
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IV Gram Vikas Mandals (GVMs) The GVMs or Village
Development Groups have been established for the
common development concerns of village community.
They are, in fact, the User Group Village
Institutions. In fact, they have become a broad
based village organisation where anybody could
become a member, with the focus on managing the
natural resource management (NRM). The
structure of Gram Vikas Mandal consisted of
nominated president, a management committee and a
paid secretary, whose salary was initially
subsidized by AKRSP (I) and subsequently by the
GVM.
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• Issues faced by the GVMs
• ?Politicisation Without any legislative support,
  the effectiveness of the Mandal may be adversely
  affected. Probability of highjacking the Mandal
  for political gains cannot be ruled out.
• ? Inequity Even though ideologically, the GVMs
  represent the common concerns of the entire
  village, the structure of GVM itself would lead
  to inequity since it has more or less user group
  approach. The activities became confined for that
  group of population that had access and/or
  control on natural resources. Landless labourers
  and women are generally excluded in the process.
• ? Accountability With politicisation and
  inequitable structure, the GVMs would not
  represent the entire population. Hence it may not
  necessarily accountable to the village society.
• Low Standards GVMs are often termed as jack of
  all, master of none. With not so sharp focus on
  any particular issue, its performance would have
  a higher probability of inferior quality.
• Narrowing of focus After raising initial level
  of expectations, GVMs often restrict their
  activities to one or two sectors that too not
  necessarily the community priority ones.

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V Lessons Learned and Theoretical
Implications Any programme for NRM has to be
time and location specific. The success of any
one regional programme cannot be replicated ditto
in other regions. Modifications are required on
the basis of community and social culture.
Following points emerge from the study. 1.
Without peoples greater say in the activities of
any kind, the probability of long-term success is
not very high. For sustainability of any
programme, active involvement of local population
is a necessary condition. 2. Constant efforts to
upgrade not only the technological but also the
managerial inputs among the stakeholders are
essential for conservation and development of
natural resources. 3. The government and/or
non-government organisations should facilitate
such efforts. It should act only as facilitator,
and must not act as omnipotent and omniscient.
Long term planning requires educating the
population and making sure that the transfer of
power from one generation to another remains
smooth and democratic. 4. It is crucial to
identify the stakeholders before implementing any
programme. The rural society is heterogeneous and
fragmented into caste and class.
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5. The stakeholders should be accorded the
rights to access, withdraw, manage, exclude and
alienate in respect to natural resource
utilisation. 6. Women play significant role in
maintaining and managing resources. It is this
group of the society that is badly hit when the
resource starts degrading. In the patriarch
society of India, special care should be taken to
ensure, if not equal, adequate rights given to
women in the society. 7. Besides women, the
other marginalised section of village society is
the socially backward class. In the caste
hierarchy, this section stays at the bottom of
the ladder. They have missed the bus of equal
opportunities. Majority of this group do not own
land and/or other assets significantly. They
depend on the natural resources for their
survival. It becomes important to address the
needs of the marginalised section and facilitate
them to unite and act collectively to improve
their say in the management of natural
resources. 8. The approach should be that of
Integrated Natural Resource Development Programme.
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Theoretical Implications The school of thoughts
for NRM in the traditional economic literature
The market occupies the centre stage as a
better institution for resource management and
price provides the correct signals of the
relative scarcity/abundance of the resource.
Scholars have argued in favour of privatisation
of the resource on efficiency criterion. But as
the implicit assumptions underlining the Pareto
optimum outcomes are not met with in real world,
market tends to fail in allocating the resources
in the optimum manner leading to overexploitation
of the resource, specially the natural resources.
Also, the decisions taken under private ownership
have a greater probability to result into social
inequity and conflicts. The other option is
nationalisation (although it can be considered as
a special case of privatisation) of the resource.
The State is assumed to have an edge over other
systems in a number of ways. It has facilitating
infrastructure and can decide about the
betterment of its people more effectively in its
long term planning, the low rate of discount
would result into sustainable utilisation of the
resource and revenue mobilisation necessary for
resource development is easier for the State. But
in recent times, we have seen the State failing.
The insensitivity, corruption and lack of
accountability prevailing in the government and
bureaucratic systems are perhaps the strongest
deterrents. have failed to achieve desired
results.
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Privatisation and/or nationalisation of the
resource may not be the solutions for its
sustainable development. Many scholars have
advocated appropriate changes in the existing
system of communal management for enhancing its
effectiveness. All uses of natural resources,
irrespective of whether they are owned privately
or publicly, are interdependent and require the
cooperation of all the resource users for
internalising/minimising the externalities
involved. In these circumstances, the sustainable
utilisation of natural resources requires the
collective management system.
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It is important to understand the implications in
this regard. As the experience has shown,
sustainable management requires well-defined
property rights. For GVMs, the membership is
adequately defined. The size of stakeholders is
adequate, so that monitoring of their activities
can be monitored. The nature of the resource,
land or irrigation, is such that free riding
tendency can be curbed. The usufruct rights are
well defined and monitoring by both the
stakeholders and external agency, i.e., AKRSP (I)
that prevents overutilisation of resource in
question. As far as resilience and sustainability
are concerned, it is too early to predict the
future of the resource, but let us be optimistic
about the future. If the stakeholders foresee
future benefits from collective management of the
natural resource, they would continue following
the cooperative spirit and GVMs could flourish in
the future, too. As far as replication of the
model is concerned, the answer can be in
affirmation, provided the model is modified
keeping in mind time and location characteristics
as mentioned earlier. But the survival of this
spaceship is in our hands and only our
cooperative actions can save the earth for the
generations to come.
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Let me also end this paper by remembering Mahatma
Gandhi, Father of India and the founder of the
institute that I represent. He fought for Indian
political independence and was successful. But
his real goal was economic and social
independence that he tried to achieve but could
not during his lifetime. His Hind Swaraj and
India of my Dreams reveals his vision of Indian
society, where he emphasised the essence of
cooperation within the community for its
development. Hence, it becomes our moral
responsibility to fulfil his dreams. The problem
of managing of natural resources is of recent
origins, but had he been alive today, he would
have recommended the same cooperative solution.
Thank You