Abstract

Government promoted protected areas (PAs), and large integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) such as joint forest management (JFM) are normally mentioned as the only means of conservation and locals are mentioned as the sourcewhere 'biotic pressure' comes from in most of the curricula which could make the professional conservation biologists and policy makers biased and may consider locals as a threat to conservation. Education based on the western-centric approaches to conservation in India have left the forest department officials and the officials of line departments concerned with conservation, such as agriculture, live-stock and irrigation indifferent to people’s initiatives. Besides, it made the policy makers inefficient to design holistic and appropriate inclusive policies related to conservation and development. This situation could be attributed to the hitherto existing gap in formal education due to lack of inclusion of community-based conservation initiatives (CBCIs) and humanities especially in the academic curriculum of conservation biology. Hence, it is hypothesized that the existing gap between scientific world and ground realities in India could be abridged if the issue of CBCIs and humanities finds their way into academic curriculum and research domains of conservation biology, natural resource management and environmental sciences.

Key words: Community-based conservation (rfCBC), community-based conservation initiative (CBCI), Forest Survey of India (FSI), forest department (FD), Indian Forest Service (IFS), International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), Joint Forest Management (JFM), the Theme on Indigenous and Local Communities, Equity, and Protected Areas (TILCEPA), integrated conservation and development project (ICDP).