Challenges Facing Land-Based Common Pool Resources in India: Degradation and Decline

India’s villages have long depended on shared natural resources – community forests, grazing lands, village ponds, riverbeds, and wastelands – collectively known as common pool resources (CPRs). These resources provide fuel, fodder, food, timber, and livelihood opportunities, particularly for the rural poor. Yet, over the past several decades, land-based CPRs in India have been shrinking at an alarming rate. The causes are varied and deeply intertwined with population dynamics, policy decisions, economic shifts, and institutional failures. Understanding these challenges is essential for anyone interested in sustainability, rural development, or ecological economics.

Why land-based CPRs matter in rural India 🔗

Before diving into the problems, it helps to understand why these resources are so critical. According to research by N.S. Jodha, one of the foremost scholars on this subject, 84 to 100 percent of rural poor households in India’s dry regions depend on common property resources for fuel, fodder, and food. In contrast, wealthier farming households rely far less on these shared lands. Studies by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) have estimated that CPRs contribute between 12 and 23 percent of rural household incomes among poorer communities. Common lands also serve vital ecological functions such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and groundwater recharge. Their decline, therefore, is not just an economic loss – it is an ecological and social crisis.

Five key factors behind CPR deterioration in India 🔗

The deterioration of land-based CPRs in India can be traced to five interconnected factors: illegal encroachment driven by population growth, legal privatization through land reform policies, poor management and institutional failures, industrialization and infrastructure development, and the commercialization of CPR-based activities. Each of these deserves a closer look.

1. Illegal encroachment and population pressure 🔗

One of the most significant drivers of CPR decline is encroachment – the gradual, often illegal, occupation of common lands by individuals. In rural India, where population growth has been substantial, the demand for agricultural and residential land has intensified pressure on shared resources. Poorly defined property rights make encroachment easier. When community boundaries are unclear and revenue departments are lax in monitoring, individuals incrementally extend into common lands season by season.

Research from Karnataka State has shown that encroachment is typically incremental – farmers make small extensions into common land over time, banking on the hope that the government will eventually regularize their claims. Detection and prevention of encroachment is costly, and the uncertainty faced by encroachers actually motivates them to keep expanding. This creates a troubling dynamic where gradual loss of common land becomes almost inevitable unless enforcement is both consistent and comprehensive.

The consequences fall hardest on the most vulnerable. The landless, women, rural artisans, and small farmers are the primary users of CPRs. When common lands are encroached upon, these groups lose access to grazing grounds, fuelwood sources, and supplementary income opportunities. Pressure from urbanization and vested interest groups further compounds the problem, as influential actors often facilitate encroachment for private gain.

2. Legal privatization through land reform policies 🔗

Ironically, some of the most significant losses of CPR land in India have come through well-intentioned government policies. Starting in the 1950s, India implemented land reform programmes aimed at redistributing land to the landless and poor. However, as Jodha’s landmark research documented, when governments failed to acquire surplus land from large landholders through ceiling laws, they turned to the easier option – redistributing common lands instead.

The results were often counterproductive. Most common lands are ecologically fragile, submarginal, and best suited for natural vegetation rather than agriculture. Once divided into individual private holdings and brought under the plough, crop yields were only one-fourth to one-half of what traditionally cropped lands produced. Worse still, a significant share of redistributed land ended up with non-poor families, who received larger parcels. Among poor recipients, 23 to 45 percent eventually lost their allotted land because it was too unproductive to sustain without additional resources.

In India, land-based CPRs fall under three main administrative bodies: the Revenue Department, the Gram Panchayat, and the Forest Department. Revenue lands and panchayat-managed commons have been most susceptible to privatization and redistribution through government welfare schemes since the 1960s. The Forest Department, by comparison, has maintained relatively stricter controls on land use, though even forest lands face their own set of pressures. The net result is a steady erosion of the collective land base that once supported entire village economies.

3. Industrialization and infrastructure development 🔗

India’s post-independence push toward industrialization and modern infrastructure has been another major driver of CPR loss. Factories, highways, dams, mining operations, and urban expansion all require land – and common lands have been a preferred target. The reason is straightforward: acquiring CPR lands involves far less resistance and legal complexity than acquiring private holdings. Communities that depend on commons often lack the political influence to contest land acquisition effectively.

As an IFPRI discussion paper highlighted, policymakers have historically viewed common lands as “wastelands,” leading to their systematic diversion for industrial and commercial use. This colonial-era framing – where land not under cultivation was deemed unproductive – has persisted into modern policy. The result has been massive transfers of common property land to industrial projects, displacing communities who depend on these resources. Landless Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, along with other marginalized groups without formal property rights, are disproportionately affected by such displacement.

This problem is not limited to heavy industry. Urbanization continues to consume common lands on city peripheries. Around Bangalore, for instance, hundreds of lakes have been lost to urban expansion and industrial pollution – lakes that communities once used for agriculture, fishing, and domestic needs.

4. Poor management and institutional breakdown 🔗

Even where CPR lands have not been physically taken away, their quality and productivity have declined sharply due to poor management. Traditionally, villages had informal rules and customary arrangements governing the use of shared resources – who could graze animals where, how much fuelwood could be collected, and when certain areas needed to rest and regenerate. These systems, while imperfect, maintained a degree of ecological balance.

The introduction of formal governance structures disrupted these traditional systems without adequately replacing them. When feudal systems were abolished and elected Village Panchayats took over management responsibilities, the transition was rarely smooth. According to Jodha’s study of 80 villages across India’s dry regions, nearly 90 percent of villages had stopped enforcing historical regulations – both formal and informal – governing CPR use. The expansion of state control weakened traditional management systems, effectively turning many regulated commons into open-access resources where anyone could exploit them without any obligation to maintain them.

Forest lands offer a telling example. Government interventions like Joint Forest Management (JFM) programmes were designed to involve communities in forest protection. However, the dominant purpose of JFM has often been perceived as protection rather than conservation, with the state retaining sole ownership and communities reduced to the role of beneficiaries rather than rights-holders. As a result, pre-existing community institutions were frequently ignored, and in some cases, the status of local people actually worsened under formal management compared to what they enjoyed under traditional systems.

Overexploitation is the inevitable consequence of this institutional vacuum. In Jodha’s study villages, the number of different products collected from CPRs dropped from a range of 27-46 before the 1950s to just 8-22 by the 1980s. This decline in product diversity also signals a significant loss of biodiversity in common lands.

5. Commercialization of CPR-based activities 🔗

The final factor is the shift from subsistence to market-oriented use of CPR products. Traditionally, much of what communities harvested from common lands – fuelwood, fodder, medicinal herbs, fruits, fibres – was consumed locally or exchanged through barter systems. The commercialization of rural economies changed this dynamic fundamentally.

As market linkages expanded and the monetary economy penetrated rural areas, products from common lands acquired commercial value. Items like non-timber forest products (NTFPs), including gum, resin, medicinal herbs, and bamboo, became saleable commodities. This created incentives for profit-driven extraction rather than sustainable harvesting. When a basket of forest herbs is worth money in the market, the motivation to collect more – well beyond what the ecosystem can sustain – becomes powerful.

N.S. Jodha identified market forces as a key driver in the erosion of common property resources as early as the 1980s. Commercialization transforms the relationship between communities and their shared resources from one based on stewardship and subsistence to one driven by short-term profit maximization. The transition from barter to monetized exchange systems has made CPR products more valuable in market terms, but this has not translated into better management or conservation. Instead, it has accelerated resource depletion.

The scale of the problem: CPRs by the numbers 🔗

The data tells a stark story. Research by Chopra (2002) estimated that CPR land constituted about 21.6 percent of India’s total geographical area in 1980-81. By the time the NSSO conducted its survey in 1998, this had shrunk to roughly 15 percent, with losses ranging from 1 to 32 percent across districts. Further analysis shows that pastures and grazing lands fell from 3.6 percent to 3.1 percent of India’s total area between 1980 and 2015, while culturable wastelands declined from 5.1 percent to 3.8 percent over the same period.

Meanwhile, ISRO assessments reveal that around 97.85 million hectares – nearly 30 percent of India’s total geographical area – was undergoing land degradation as of 2018-19. While not all of this is CPR land, the overlap is significant. The Indian government has committed to achieving Land Degradation Neutrality by 2030 under Sustainable Development Goal 15.3, but meeting this target will require addressing the specific drivers of CPR decline.

Who suffers the most? 🔗

The decline of CPRs does not affect all sections of rural society equally. It is the poorest households – small and marginal farmers, landless labourers, women, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes – who bear the brunt. These are the communities that derive the highest proportion of their income and subsistence needs from commons. When CPR lands shrink or degrade, these groups face reduced access to fuel, fodder, and food; loss of supplementary income; increased time and labour spent in collecting diminishing resources; and greater vulnerability to drought and seasonal hardships.

Research consistently shows that the collective loss suffered by the rural poor as former users of common property resources is rarely compensated by the individual gains from privatization or development. The vicious cycle of poverty and resource degradation reinforces itself – as resources decline, the poor are pushed further into poverty, and as poverty deepens, the pressure to overexploit remaining resources intensifies.

Looking ahead: what needs to change 🔗

Addressing the decline of land-based CPRs requires action on multiple fronts. Stronger enforcement against encroachment, more thoughtful land-use policies that recognize the ecological and social value of commons, revitalization of community-based management institutions, and policies that check unchecked commercialization are all essential. Organizations like the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) have demonstrated that community-led restoration of commons is both possible and effective, having intervened in over 10,000 villages to restore more than 200,000 hectares of common lands and forests.

The fundamental shift that is needed, however, is in perception. As long as common lands continue to be viewed as “wastelands” – idle, unproductive land awaiting privatization or development – their decline will continue. Recognizing commons as productive, ecologically essential, and socially vital resources is the first step toward protecting what remains.

What do you think? Should India prioritize strengthening community rights over common lands, or is the current trajectory of privatization and industrial development inevitable? How can urban citizens, who benefit indirectly from the ecosystem services CPRs provide, contribute to their conservation?

References

1. https://www.fao.org/4/v3960e/v3960e05.htm
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4. https://www.indiawaterportal.org/articles/common-lands-are-not-wastelands
5. https://cuesonline.org/2020/11/11/whose-city-whose-commons-urbanization-and-the-fate-of-peri-urban-commons-in-india/
6. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/57a08d2940f0b652dd0017c6/R7973_F2INDIA.PDF
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