Restoring age-old land rights has enabled 300 villagers to build a profitable business and halt the exodus to the city
It’s late morning and the sound of axes clacking against wood echoes through Pachgaon’s bamboo forest in the central Indian state of Maharashtra. A huge depot, larger than a cricket stadium, is full of bamboo branches, stacked neatly by size in different sections. Nearby is a small, windowless office painted in the colours of the forest – a record-keeper of Pachgaon’s turnaround from abject poverty to relative wealth in just over a decade.
Pachgaon’s rags-to-riches story follows the implementation of two longstanding Indian laws that restored to the local adivasi (tribal) community its traditional ownership rights over the forest, which they lost to rulers and colonisers several generations ago.
