How a programme to revitalise moribund village panchayats has achieved success in a corner of the Uttar Pradesh hills. The key was to let the villagers themselves take active charge of setting priorities and implementing projects.
Bhetuli is a small hill village in Almora District, Uttar Pradesh. I recently attended a village meeting in which most of the village people and youth took active part. The meeting was called to decide on the control and management of the community's forests.
As the group gathered, Jamar Singh, the sarpanch (headman) of the forest panchayat, explained that the village had 55 acres of community forest land given to it by the state government. However, some portions of it had been encroached upon by villagers. Immediately, there was a heated exchange in which some emphasised the need to end the encroachment while others spoke of the urgent need to grow trees on land that had become barren. But the most important question was that of leadership. Before you knew it, the people had decided that Jamar Singh was incapable of managing the common resource of the village. Shankar Singh, a much younger man, was chosen as the new sarpanch, with authority to frame new policies and to implement them in order to protect the forests.
The vitality of the Bhetuli meeting showed that a campaign launched by an Uttar Pradesh non-governmental group to reactivate defunct village panchayats was bearing fruit. In some of its hill districts, the Uttar Pradesh government had allotted community forests known as "van panchayats". A constituent body of villagers, the panchayat, was empowered to manage this common resource. When it was drafted, the Van Panchayat law was a novel attempt to help the villages, but in actual practice, many panchayats became lifeless bodies dominated by powerful villagers who actively took part in or colluded in the encroachment of common forest lands.