Purana Sahitya mein Paryavaran Samrakshan

This book illustrates how people in rural Bangladesh, without any institutional or material support, manage their water resources to make their environment safer or more productive. Case studies of over seven hundred local initiatives show that people have an underestimated capacity to design, construct, maintain and operate relatively complex water management systems and to mobilise large amounts of human, material and financial resources. They are neither passive victims of their environment, nor merely responding or reacting to programmes or services provided by ‘outside’ agencies. It was found, however, that the capacity to organise is much higher in some regions of Bangladesh than in others. This leads the author to examine conditions under which people get together to pursue common goals through a systematic, comparative analysis of the four regions covered by the research project. The findings are further reviewed against the backdrop of academic and policy debates on collective action, participation, and management of common property resources.

Understanding the ecological knowledge of tribal and rural societies is necessary to conserve and sustain natural resources. This volume discusses the history and importance of ethnobotany with specific reference to four tribal communities of Odisha, India. It begins with an account of the nature of the tribes involved in the study. Based on participatory fieldwork, it presents an insider’s account of the tribal culture and its relationship with plants. It provides the ethnobotanical descriptions of 210 species of plants belonging to 77 families, presenting their local names, origin and the medicinal, cultural, culinary, economic, ecological uses of the species. It takes up study of the plants used by tribes in the drug-based and spiritual healing processes elaborating the philosophies behind knowledge transmission such as divination, hereditary, discipleship and kinship. Related aspects such as disease diagnosis, diet restrictions and rituals are depicted in detail. There is a special chapter on forests and non-timber forest products (NTFPs) that details the efforts of communities in forest conservation, their land-use patterns, forest classification systems, list of NTFPs and their harvest-consumption patterns. It also deals with the role of NGOs, middlemen and government agencies in this. Throughout, the emphasis is on the philosophical relationship of the communities with their ecosystem.
The book would prove extremely useful to policy-makers, academicians, social workers and general readers looking forward to accompany the tribal communities towards ethno-sensitive development.