Introduction:

India has some of the world’s most important natural habitats and harbours about 6% of the world’s biodiversity on 2% of its landmass. For generations, thousands of human communities, have lived in the midst of this rich biodiversity and evolved sustainable lifestyles, of a symbiotic nature with the natural bounty around them 

In the last two centuries, these equations have been radically challenged and threatened by various factors. Among them are a social and political mandate that favours maximum extraction of natural resources to achieve a certain paradigm of ‘Development’ and a top-down model of conservation that ignores and threatens the very existence of the first allies of conservation – local people whose lives are deeply entwined with that of their surrounding for their physical, social, emotional and moral sustenance, in fact their very livelihood.

However in the midst of all this conflict, several local communities continue to conserve and sustainably manage eco-systems and wildlife populations around them. The community-based protection and management efforts are either a continuation of traditional practices or a revival of traditional systems or a development of completely new systems based on the local specificities and conditions. These efforts may be self-initiated or started with the help of NGOs or even with the help of government officials.

The community based conservation efforts may have many lessons relevant to the formal biodiversity/wildlife conservation strategies, laws and policies. In particular, these lessons relate to institutional structures, the combination of statutory and customary law, the link between livelihood security and conservation, and decentralisation of power.

Given, the above scenario, the country must continue and intensify its efforts in community based biodiversity conservation and livelihood security; however there is a tremendous paucity of information on the subject matter that even practitioners and policy makers suffer from. Field level workers have even lesser access to information. Even where information does exist, most people and agencies do not have adequate access to it. This project is a step towards filling this lacuna.

Aims and Objectives:

The Documentation and Outreach Centre aims to strengthen the effort by providing an information dissemination service to various stakeholder groups on:

1. Issues related to community based biodiversity conservation and livelihood security and related subjects which have a direct bearing on these.

2. Material resources (books, reports, articles, papers, advocacy material) available with Kalpavriksh on the subject matter.

Towards this  

1. We currently have a Reading and Reference Centre located at the Pune office, where people can access available books, reports and papers on the subject matter. Entry is free and the Centre is open to those interested on all week days, except Saturday and Sunday, between 11:30 pm and 5 pm. The ‘Reading and Reference Centre’ houses over 4000 books, 1000 reports and thousands of magazines. We have put up some lists of the resource material available at the documentation centre. These lists are not comprehensive and for further inquiries contact kvoutreach@gmail.com or the Documentation centre at the Pune office.

2. We put out a tri-annual newsletter on community based biodiversity conservation and livelihood security in Hindi and English. For free copies of the same, please contact kvoutreach@gmail.com or the Pune office.

3. We put out advocacy material on community based biodiversity conservation and related issues. For free copies of the same, please contact kvoutreach@gmail.com or at the Pune office.

4. We are putting together a database of resource people and people with expertise in the area of community based biodiversity conservation and livelihood security and related areas within India,