Project assistance completion report on a project (9/81-3/87) to create a capacity within the Government of Madhya Pradesh (GOMP), India, to develop community forestry management and encourage private plantings.
In view of the haste in which the project was designed, its mixed success was predictable. Of eight assumptions important for project success, only two proved correct, and both of these were directly connected to private planting. Perhaps the project's most significant output has been the distribution of some 200 million seedlings to about 1.25 million private landowners. Planted on land that was otherwise idle, these trees have provided farmers with a cash crop and helped to restablilize the soil and increase groundwater recharge; survival rates have been 50-80%.
Community forestry was far less successful. About 47,665 ha were planted, but production in most of the plantations will not meet expectations, due mostly to lack of community participation. It proved almost impossible to get neighboring villages to cooperate in woodlot management - in one panchayat (administrative area comprising 3-6 villages) several battles were fought over the issue and one man killed. Another reason for public forestry's lack of success was the spotty quality of extension by the GOMP's Social Forestry Directorate (SFD), created by the project as a wing of the Forestry Department. Although the SFD appears to be becoming institutionalized, its extension staff remain largely untrained and often uncommitted to community work. (In fact, the SFD, at the PACD, elected to drop all further efforts at community development.) Nor were matters helped by the lack of continuity in SFD leadership (6 directors in 5 1/2 years).
The project's problems have made clear the need to ascertain, during design or before, whether high-level counterparts have both the willingness and ability to implement the project as designed. Also, in projects where extension is important, some member of the design team should be experienced in extension services. Other lessons are, inter alia: (1) arrangements for research and training should be made outside the project agreement (ProAg), since the GOI gives a low priority to these activities; (2) both the PP and the ProAg should be translated into the local languages if staff are expected to be familiar with them; (3) if implementation is meant to be flexible, this should be spelled out explicitly in the ProAg, since otherwise GOI personnel will rigidly follow the procedures outlined; (4) permissible sources of origin of international training should include China and other such countries (to do otherwise is nonproductive and sometimes embarrassing); (5) rural projects should have the village (not panchayat) as the decisionmaking level.
