Centre for People's Forestry

Centre for People's Forestry (CPF) is a non-profit, non-political and secular organisation working with forest-dwelling, forest-dependent and other resource-poor communities in India. It began in 1996 as an autonomous wing of the Centre for World Solidarity and was established as an independent organisation on 6 August 2002. CPF describes its purpose as the emancipation of these communities through the realisation of their rights and their access to, control over and sustainable management of natural resources. Capacity development, advocacy and policy influence are the organisation's stated core contributions. It works through local NGOs, community-based organisations and state and national government agencies, and conducts action research before designing interventions, publishing the findings through reports and workshops. The organisation states four operating principles: participation, transparency, accountability, and equity and equality.

Headquarters: Secunderabad, Telangana, India

Major Areas of Work

• Rights and entitlements: Securing Community Forest Resource rights and other forest rights entitlements for forest-dwelling communities.

• Participatory natural resource management: Supporting communities to conserve, manage and use forest resources in ways that hold their livelihood security.

• Action research and policy advocacy: Participatory studies on forestry policy, non-timber forest produce, forest governance and livelihood options, used to argue for policy change.

• Climate change adaptation: Promoting climate-resilient agriculture and agroecological practice in forest fringe and rural areas.

• Rural development services: Health, nutrition, village development planning, digital access and skill development in rural Andhra Pradesh.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Forest Communities Programme: CPF's founding programme, running since 1996, working on community ownership of forests, Community Forest Resource rights, participatory resource management and climate adaptation.

• Rural Communities Programme: Running since 2015 as an implementing partner to Tata Trusts in the Vijayawada parliamentary constituency and wider Andhra Pradesh, covering health, nutrition, village development, digital initiatives and skill development.

• Informal Sectors Worker's Initiatives (ISWI): A Tata Trusts supported project providing placement-linked skill-based training.

• Village development planning: Facilitating participatory preparation and implementation of village development plans to sustain basic amenities.

• Digital initiatives: Community internet access work run with partners including Google India and Intel.

The Forest Communities Programme is the organisation's flagship. Its position is that forest communities should hold ownership of the forests they live in and depend on, and the programme works from that claim outward: first securing Community Forest Resource titles under the Forest Rights Act, then supporting the management protocols, produce marketing and governance arrangements that decide whether a title translates into income. CPF's published action research follows the same line, covering post-title management protocols, non-timber forest produce, bamboo harvesting and marketing, benefit sharing, and the role of women in NTFP.

Impact

CPF states that it works across 609 villages in 11 districts of four states: Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Odisha, with the largest presence in Telangana. Its Forest Communities Programme reports 87 villages covered and 4,940 households practising climate adaptation strategies. It maintains partnerships with Tata Trusts, Google India and Intel, and works alongside local NGOs, community-based organisations and state forest and rural development departments.

Leadership

• Girija Devi Boddupalli, Director

• Dr. Kameswara Rao, Managing Trustee

• E. Poorna Chander, Senior Programme Officer and HR

• K. Satyanarayana, Senior Programme Officer, Rural Communities Programme

Working at CPF means field-level work on forest rights in tribal and forest fringe districts, where the gap between a law on paper and a community actually controlling its forest is the daily problem. The organisation pairs implementation with published research and policy advocacy, so staff get exposure to both the village-level process of claiming and managing forest resources and the state and national policy argument built on top of it. It suits people who want long-horizon community work in remote districts, are comfortable working through local NGOs and government departments rather than around them, and want their field observations to end up in studies and policy briefs rather than stopping at a project report.