Hundred Stories of Success and Resilience from India’s Shared Landscapes
Nutgraph Social Data Lab, in collaboration with Common Ground Initiative, is happy to launch ‘100 Stories of the Commons’, a public archive that journeys across India to document how communities live with and care for shared environmental resources. These narratives reveal how millions continue to depend on, and protect India's commons.
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Nutgraph Social Data Lab, in collaboration with Common Ground Initiative, is happy to launch ‘100 Stories of the Commons’, a public archive that journeys across India to document how communities live with and care for shared environmental resources. These narratives reveal how millions continue to depend on, and protect India's commons.
What are ‘Commons?’
Commons, or common property resources, are shared landscapes and natural resources that communities collectively use, manage and protect.
They include forests, grazing lands, wetlands, rivers, coasts, village ponds and other ecosystems that have been collectively utilised and stewarded by a community for generations. It alters from the idea of individual ownership, and has been governed through shared institutions, local knowledge and collective responsibility.
What makes them significant?
Nearly 350 million people depend on common property resources, which make up almost 25% of India's landscape. Yet, commons as an entity embodying the community dependence & custodianship relationship remain largely invisible in legal and policy frameworks governing land and natural resources.
While progressive legislations such as the Forest Rights Act have, through Community Forest Rights, acknowledged the role of forest-dependent communities as both custodians and rights-holders, similar recognition has not extended across other common landscapes. Grazing lands, wetlands, coastal commons, and other shared ecosystems continue to be poorly understood, inadequately protected, and frequently treated as vacant or underutilised land, even demarcated under the colonial terminology of ‘wasteland'. This has disproportionately marginalised communities such as pastoralists, fisherfolk, and others whose livelihoods depend on these commons.
100 Stories of Commons attempts to challenge this by bringing grassroots stories to the forefront, helping demystify these generational socio-ecological relationships in the present context.
Through stories from across India, the initiative documents how communities have generationally been the custodians of these shared landscapes, highlighting their knowledge, institutions, and stewardship efforts. In doing so, it seeks to shift the conversation from viewing commons as marginal spaces to recognising them as socioecological systems that are central to rural livelihoods, community resilience, and the future of India's environment.
