Analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘Malki Practice’ for conserving the Dang forest in Gujarat, India along with improving the socio-economic standards of the land holders

Abstract

Looking to the present environmental crisis and the global trend of alarming deforestation, it is very important to study various forest management strategies to understand their effectiveness and advantages along with the bottlenecks and limitations. It is indeed very important to conserve the forests but the economic sustainability of the people directly linked with the forests cannot be ignored. Due to very limited availability of the socio-economic data of the people directly dependent on forests (especially in the developing countries) and the lack of an inter-disciplinary approach interfacing the socio-economic data with the scientifically estimated forest area and its green cover density, not many studies could comprehensively bring out the effectiveness of a particular forest management approach. The present study is one of the first few studies which connects these two independent datasets and fetches the usefulness of the ‘Malki Practice’ driven forest management approach in the Dang forest of Gujarat, India. It uses the remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to estimate the green cover density in the Dang forest, a statistical approach for assessing the type of trend in the NDVI (increasing / decreasing at different significance levels) and the socio-economic data generated by the state Forest Department regarding the earnings made through the sale of logs and the house-hold surveys. The ‘environmental success’ of the Malki Practice can be seen from the fact that 74% of the Dang forest witnessed an increasing trend in the green cover density which backs the fact that around one million plantations would have been done in the forest in-lieu of the 200,000 trees which were cut during 1994–2019 while the ‘economic success’ of the Malki Practice can be attributed to the fact that 19,936 land holders earned 39.4 million US Dollars through the sale of logs. Juxtaposing the ‘environmental success’ with the ‘economic success’ it can be inferred that the ‘Malki Practice’ of forest conservation adopted in the state of Gujarat, India is worth considering for being drawn upon or replicated in other parts of the world.