Kendu leaves: 29 Odisha villages win complete autonomy, but still a long way to go downtoearth.org.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from downtoearth.org.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Inside ad hoc forests downtoearth.org.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from downtoearth.org.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
An orchard owner in Budgam s Kani Dajan village surveys the damage. | Safwat Zargar
Mohammad Ahsan Wagay does not remember which day it happened. His memory is blurred by the shock. Sometime in the third week of November, a team of forest department officials arrived at Kani Dajan village in Central Kashmir’s Budgam district. They left behind a trial of destruction, cutting down hundreds of apple trees and damaging other crops on forest land occupied by village residents.
Wagay’s orchard was also flattened. “They axed around 200 of my apple trees,” he said. “They just came and felled our trees. They didn’t even give us a chance to uproot them on our own. When I went to my orchard, I wanted to cry.”
In India, mainstream environmentalism and development situate biodiversity conservation and human well-being as mutually exclusive goals. This is contentious because a large section of India’s population has inextricable economic, social, political, and cultural linkages with its rich biodiversity. The 4-Cs framework is suggested to address human well-being within the purview of ecosystem assessment and management by incorporating multiple social-ecological variables. Examples of domains, attributes, and indicators of human well-being are examined in the context of the Forest Rights Act (2006). Further, the framework can be tailor-made to guide conservation practitioners, establish the discourse on human well-being in the field of biodiversity science, and broaden the normative understanding of human well-being as an essential outcome of biodiversity conservation.