India - Common Property Resources & Village Facilities, NSS 54th Round : Jan 1998 - June 1998

Common property land resources include community pastures, village forests & woodlots, village sites, common dumping and threshing grounds. The control and management of village pastures and grazing grounds is vested with the village panchayats. There may be some other land formally held by the panchayat or a community of the village. For this block, 'commons' will include only such land resources which are formally under the control and management of Panchayat or a community of the village. However, land put to non-agricultural uses, except water bodies will be excluded.

Panchayat land, even when given on lease to others, will be considered as common property in all cases for the present survey. Thus, panchayat land given on tree patta to individuals will also be included in CPR.

Village Panchayat grazing land / pasture land: This a well defined category of land in the classification used in official land-use records. Traditionally, grazing and pastureland has been the most important constituent of CPR land. Many villages have land earmarked as permanent pastures / grazing land. These are variously known as gauchar, gochar, gairan, gomal etc. Villagers have user right on permanent pastures by legal sanction. Care should, however, taken to exclude the area of village woodlots brought up on the grazing / pasture land.

Items 1.1 to 1.4 & 1.9: Common village land as on the date of survey and conventional right of use: Common village land or Commons refers to common property land resources within the boundary of the sample village. The area of common property land resources in this restricted sense, and the right of use of the villagers will be recorded in these items.

Area (0.00 ha.) of common village land: For each category of common village land (commons), area of land formally held by the panchayat or a community of the village and falling within the boundary of the sample village will be recorded in hectares in two places of decimal. Area of all water bodies located in the category of the commons should also be taken into account while collecting the information. Care should be taken to ensure that entries made are actually given in two places of decimal. For example, if the area reported is 15 hectares, the entry should be "15.00" and not just "15". If there is no CPR of a particular category, record "0.00" in the corresponding cell. No cell of this column may be left blank. The total of area in Items 1.1 to 1.4 will be recorded in Item 1.9.