Most people were food gatherers and hunters. Did not have ideas of private property — therefore everybody had equal rights to natural resources. No individual or group owned the forests, land or water. Natural resources were common property. (see box Who owns the Sun? Pg. 65).

Separate households owned herds of cattle. Pastures were common property and individual herders had access to the grazing land. Once a pasture got exhausted, they moved to greener pastures. They were thus practicing nomads. If and when they settled, they developed some practices to restrain overuse of resource. The ahmias system in Taif, Saudi Arabia, did not allow grazing when they had fodder reserves. They also limited the number of cattle grazing during other periods to allow regeneration of grass.

A family had control over land but had to follow rules set by the village community. The village community had the right to reassign land during non-cropping season or use it as common resource for grazing and other activities. Non-cultivable land within village boundaries was used to supply fuel, grazing land, manure, etc. for the community and was controlled by the village communities. This also applied to water sources such as lakes, ponds, tanks, springs and rivulets.

Along came village chiefs and strongmen. One or more villages formed chiefdoms, depending on how much surplus could be extracted from cultivators. They imposed a formal lagaan on peasants which they paid for the land they cultivated on. Food gatherers continued to exist in the Himalayas, north-east India, the central plateau and eastern and western ghats.

Chiefdoms of the older times made way for larger states like that of the Mauryas and Kushanas in north India and the Chalukyas and Cholas in peninsular India. Yajnas by the brahmins (in which huge tracts of forest were cleared by burning) and smaller chiefdoms helped bringing more land under cultivation. More land under agriculture meant more lagaan . More lagaan meant more wine, women and song — at least for the royalty!

Medieval India created a lot of wealth. The wealth generated from the lagaan paid by the toiling peasants led to growth of non-agricultural activities like trade and urbanization.

The king had a vested interest in the welfare of his subjects. He increased soil productivity by providing improved irrigation facilities. Cholas (900 AD to 1200 AD) introduced tank irrigation system with sluice gates. Irrigation and water management was managed by temples. Kings gave land grants to brahmins for construction of new tanks for the village use. The technology was spread by the hindu priests.

Over centuries, land around each village transformed into a complex eco-system of croplands, grazing lands, forest and tree lands constituting an interactive, multi-component biological system. Croplands were private property while grasslands, tree lands, tanks and ponds were common property resources and common rules applied to their use. Religious practices developed to conserve nature. Cow and grazing lands (gauchars), tanks and their catchment were considered sacred and forests were set aside as sacred groves.

In the Jajmani system of Maharastra, every village had twelve ayangadees or officers with a patel at the head of it. The patel was the collector, magistrate and head farmer. The king did not interfere with the villages’ day-to-day working. Villages paid bhog or tax in kind. The ayangadees were either alloted land or a fixed proportion of every farmers’ crop for their service.

Besides hunting animals in these forests the nobility demarcated areas of the forests where wild elphants could be captured for use in armies. Elephant forests and hunting preserves brought in a new form of territorial control over living resources — control by the state.