Collective Action for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: The Case of Korchi Mahagramsabha

Community Forest Resource Rights (CFR rights) under The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 give forest-dwelling communities a unique opportunity to extract, manage, and sell nontimber forest products (NTFPs) from their forests. This recognition of CFR rights has enabled forest dwelling communities to develop diverse mechanisms for transparent, equitable, and sustainable processes of NTFP procurement and marketing. The Korchi Mahagramsabha, a coalition of local-level institutions, is an example of one such mechanism that emerged in the post-CFR recognition phase in ‘Gadchiroli’, Maharashtra. The study details the mechanisms for collective action and also the factors
that facilitate and impede the functioning of such mechanisms. Given the immediate positive socioeconomic impact, such coalitions/collective action mechanisms and their activities need to be supported in order to make them fully functional and empowered. Divya Gupta is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru.