Contributions of common lands to household economies in Haryana, India

Abstract

Common lands, being a significant form of natural resource endowment in many developing countries, play a vital role in maintaining the ecological balance, and more particularly in supporting the people, especially the rural poor, in eking out their livelihood. However, the contributions of common lands to the rural economy and ecology have remained unappreciated which has led to the depletion and degradation of these lands. In an attempt to examine the nature and extent of contribution of common lands to household economies, 432 sample households from eight sample villages across four ecological regions in Haryana, northwest India, were surveyed using a structured questionnaire during 1995. We found that common lands still hold an important place in the household economy of rural people of this state. A significant proportion of the sample households obtained substantial biomass resources, income and employment from common lands. The contributions of these lands in terms of variety and extent were many times higher in the households belonging to less developed than developed regions, and those households belonging to poor than wealthy classes. Hence, there is an immediate need to develop effective strategies for the regeneration and sustainable use and management of common lands.

Breaking the law? Illegal livelihoods from a Protected Area in Uganda

“…In southern Africa, it has been shown that poorer households tend to opportunistically invest in activities with few entry barriers, such as the collection of forest products, and EI contributes more to the total incomes of the poor (Campbell et al, 2000;Fisher, 2004;Shackleton andShackleton, 2004, 2006a,b;Shackleton et al, 2007Shackleton et al, , 2008. Similar observations linking poor households with greater dependence are revealed in South America, for example around Peru's Pacaya-Samiria reserve (Takasaki et al, 2001), and in India by Qureshi and Kumar's (1998) extensive studies, prompting the latter to reiterate that the maintenance of common areas where the poor can derive livelihoods is "absolutely crucial". Table 3 shows that the households involved in collecting park resources had significantly lower NPEI despite their high EI.…”

The importance of dry woodlands and forests in rural livelihoods and poverty alleviation in South Africa

“…Although relatively little work in South Africa has specifically disaggregated resource use and income data based on socio-economic characteristics, there are clear indicators that poorer and more isolated communities, as well as households that are less well off or headed by women, are often more dependent on the natural resource base (Shackleton et al, 2002a;Shackleton and Shackleton, 2006). This finding is not unusual and a significant number of studies across the tropics have demonstrated that it is generally the poorest households who are most directly reliant on nontimber forest products (NTFPs) for both subsistence and cash income (Clarke et al, 1996;Campbell et al, 1997;Qureshi and Kumar, 1998;Cavendish, 2000;Neumann and Hirsch, 2000;Cavendish, 2002). Similarly, a number of studies have indicated that among households headed by women forest resources often contribute significantly more to total household income than is the case for households headed by men (Clarke et al, 1996;Cavendish, 2000).…”

Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship Between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets

“…On the other hand, Adhikari (2003), based on data from 330 households in 8 "forest user groups" in Nepal, finds that dependence increases with income, from 14% for the poor to 22% for the rich. 5 All four studies also examine the relationship between income and the absolute level of resource use, 1 Other, much smaller-scale studies include Pasha (1992), Singh, Singh and Singh (1996), Nadkarni (1997), Qureshi and Kumar (1998), Beck and Ghosh (2000), and Fisher (2004). 2 Although we refer to households with incomes at the higher end of the rural income distribution here, and elsewhere in the paper, as rich, it is important to note that these households are still poor in absolute terms.…”