Joint Forest Management

Villagers agree to assist in the safeguarding of forest resources through protection from fire, grazing, and illegal harvesting in exchange for which they receive non-timber forest products and a share of the revenue from the sale of timber products.

The initial program involved 612 families managing 12.7 square kilometres of forests classified as "degraded".

[2] A few years later, Joint Forest Management was employed in the state of Haryana to prevent soil erosion and deforestation.

In 1977, villagers were persuaded that instead of grazing on erosion-prone hills, building small dams would help agricultural output on areas currently under cultivation.

As of 2000 27 states of the Indian Union had various JFM schemes with over 63,000 FPCs involved in the joint management of over 1400,000 km2 of forested land.