Sharing nature: the commons

Some things in nature belong to everyone together: the village pond, the grazing ground, the river, the forest, the air, the variety of life. These shared resources are ecological commons. No single person owns them; the community uses them together, often by traditional rules.

For centuries people have taken food, water, fuel, fodder and medicinal plants from the commons. But with more people, more industry and more land made private, many commons are shrinking or getting spoiled. Protecting them matters for village and tribal families, and for nature's balance, the climate and biodiversity.

A case from Bihar: who owns the fish? After Independence, inland fisheries were still run under the old Indian Fisheries Act, 1897. In Bihar, the year-round water bodies and the river-bank lands (diara) were controlled by large landowners. They kept the fishing community out, so these people were among the poorest, though they lived beside water full of fish.

Looking back at Bihar's own history (a 19th-century case), the lesson was that river regions are best looked after as commons. So Bihar passed the Bihar Fish Jalkar Management Act, 2006, later amended, which brought in community-led management, legal protection for public access, and cooperation in looking after the water. Local communities now work out their own ways to take enough fish while leaving enough to breed. The result: fish production has kept growing.

Water tanks: India's old shared reservoirs. Where rain comes only in one season, people have long treated water as a shared concern and built community tanks:

• in Bundelkhand, the Chandella and Bundela kings built about 8,000 tanks, from about 800 to 1200 CE;
• keres in Karnataka, eri tanks in Tamil Nadu, chevuru tanks in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha;
• ahar pynes in Bihar to store water;
• katas in the Gondwana region, funded by the Gond kings (rulers of the Gond kingdoms): three-sided reservoirs, with banks on three sides and the fourth open to the slope that brings the water in.

Official estimates say India still has more than 15 lakh working tanks today.