1 Draft Copy. Final version published in R. Jeffery & N.Sundar (eds.) A New Moral Economy for India's Forests? Discourses of Community and Participation, London: Sage 1999. "HOW MANY COMMITTEES DO I BELONG TO?" Abha Mishra, Shilpa Vasavada and Crispin Bates Edinburgh/ICFRE JFM Research Project INTRODUCTION A major aspect of concern in Joint Forest Management in India has been the constitution of the forest protection committee, and its role. This committee is variously known as a forest protection committee (FPC), Van Samrakshana Samiti (VSS), Village Institution (VI), Local Institution (LI), or People's Institution (PI). In most cases, the organisation is village based. Existing studies have focused on the relation of this organisation to the Panchayat as the other main actor in village level development (Poffenberger and McGean, 1996; Kadekodi and Chopra; Chatrapati Singh, 1986). In the course of our research however, we have found that the Panchayat is often not the only parallel committee to contend with, and that its role in relation to the FPC is sometimes quite insignificant. Instead we find that there are a multiplicity of 'participatory' committees, such as watershed committees, health committees, education committees etc., which are set up under the auspices of different government departments, and all of which compete for the time and attention of villagers. In this paper, we examine the notion of 'people's participation' as it is envisaged in government policies and reflected in the formation of committees at the village level. Some of the reasons advanced by government staff and non-governmental development practitioners for the plurality of committees include their efficiency in the management of particular resources, the diversification of the village leadership base, efficiency in targeting needy sections, and so on. Villagers, on the other hand, have their own views on the function of these multiple committees. We attempt to explore the extent to which these reasons hold good, and go on to examine the working of these committees vis-à-vis the Panchayats and other traditional committees of the village. This study is based on fieldwork done in the Dewas, Sambalpur, Paderu and Rajpipla divisions of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, AP and Gujarat states respectively. We start by looking at the historical background to participation - the construction of the village community in the colonial period, relative neglect of village based development during the Nehruvian period, and finally, the return to 'participatory' village based organisation since the eighties. In the next section, we take up Dewas in Madhya Pradesh as a case study, listing the number of different committees formed by different departments. The paper then deals with the response of the bureaucracy and the villagers to the plurality of committees, and the relationships between these committees and the caste and other Panchayats . Finally, we consider the impact that extension of Panchayati raj is likely to have on current and future arrangements for the representation and involvement of villagers in forestry and development work.