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Summary:

This report summarises the status of FUGs in 1998 and thereby forms a benchmark against which trends can be identified and changes measured at a later date. The report is based on the analysis of socio-economic and bio-physical data collected through surveys in 93 FUGs. The report looks specifically at the status of FUGs with women committees and those with men and mixed committees.

The present levels of awareness about legal provisions of community forestry vary within user groups. As expected, the committee members are the most knowledgeable, but important knowledge gaps persist. The level of awareness among the common users is quite low, especially among women. The information flow from the committee to the users is generally poor, information gained at trainings is seldomly disseminated and channels for targeting information flow to women have not been identified. About one fifth of the committee members have the educational level to be able to read and understand documents like the operational plan, constitution and official letters. One fifth of the committee members are illiterate with illiteracy being much more pronounced among women than among men. Almost all FUGs with women committees and about half of the FUGs with men or mixed committees, have participated in the literacy program. The demand for literacy classes remains high, especially in FUGs with women’s committees.

Elections for the committee are held in about 40% of FUGs while committee members have been changed and some task sharing has taken place in about 50% of the FUGs. There is no difference between women and men/mixed committees. There is a tendency of having some representation of all ethnic groups in the committee but the most disadvantaged groups in the caste hierarchy have lower levels of representation compared to their population size than the other ethnic groups. The representation of women on committees is very low and currently lies at 16%.

All FUGs, in their operational plan, have defined objectives for the use of their forest. Apart from a few exceptions these objectives are focused on catering for subsistence needs in forest products. Visions and objectives for community development have been defined by only a minority of FUGs. One fifth of the FUGs have some form of development plan specifying the utilisation of FUG funds. Funds are mostly utilised for the development of infrastructure; apart from spending small amounts of funds on literacy, human resource development has not been invested in. Income generation from the community forests is small and averages Rs 8000 for both types of committees.

Annual planning and work planning are undertaken by only a limited number of FUGs and few FUGs document plans. Development decisions are often recorded as minutes of meetings. Most FUGs do keep minutes of meetings. Women and interest groups participated in less than half of the cases where planning was done.
One third of the men and mixed committees and 13% of the women committees have adequate book keeping practices. Most FUG committees do present income and expenditure statements to the users and women committees tend to do this more often than men or mixed committees. In more than half of the FUGs, records were not kept safely. Women committees tended to keep their records more safely than men or mixed committees.

Nearly half of the committees have held regular to frequent meetings during the previous year, 13% had not held a single meeting. Women committees are more likely than men or mixed committees to hold general assemblies as specified in their constitution.

The linkages that FUGs maintain are mostly with the DOF/DSCO and the Project. There is little linkage with other service providers. The number and diversity of sub-groups is limited, typical sub-groups are savings and credit groups, agroforestry groups and literacy groups.

Although management rules and sanctions are defined in most operational plans, for various reasons these rules and sanctions are often not applied. Forest rules presently do not cater for an equitable distribution of forest products to users.

Comparing the present condition of the community forests to the condition one and a half to two years ago, it is seen that the condition in three quarters of the FUGs is remaining stable and there is an overall slight improvement. The regeneration of trees, especially from coppice stools, has contributed to forest improvement. The major reason for the improvements seen are attributed to the protection oriented management practices adopted by the user groups. Only a few FUGs are actually marketing forest products.

The project wishes to support FUGs in their development from user groups that use the forests to satisfy subsistence needs to user groups that use the forests as a basis for generating financial resources which can then be used for community development. With this objective in mind and against the background of the present status of the FUGs, important areas of support for the project are:

•	development planning,
•	shifting the emphasis of training from technical topics to topics on organisational management,
•	literacy,
•	attitude change from protection to utilisation of forests, enterprise development and marketing,
•	creation of linkages with service providers, forming networks and strengthening sub-grouping.