livelihoods. This approach tantamount to deliberately impoverishing them is very similar to that of British planters who in 1860 insisted that shifting cultivation be banned to force people to work on their plantations under conditions close to slavery.
Subjugation It was not a coincidence that the Wildlife Protection Act, enormously increasing the powers of the Forest bureaucracy was passed just as grass-roots protests against destructive development at the cost of common people in the countryside were mounting as was evident in the case of the Chipko andolan. Before the WLPA the Forest bureaucracy’s reach was restricted to the land legally classified as Forest land, some 23% of India’s surface; WLPA has extended it to the entire country. WLPA has gone beyond the Criminal Tnbes Act in criminalizing much of India’s rural and forest-dweller population since a large proportion of them have been for millennia engaged in hunting as a source of sorely needed protein and to protect their crops. India’s act is special; Wildlife Protection Acts in other countries focus on management of National Parks and Reserves, the rest of the country being outside the purview of such acts. This is the case in countries as different from each other as Kenya and the United States. In Kenya people widely consume so-called “bushmeat” and the Kenyan Act does not interfere and in the US the citizens hunt outside the Reserves by paying for a hunting permit.
Chipko activists were initially successful in halting tree felling in Garhwal. Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal
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