Strategic Value

Why Village Institutions Matter

Empowering community-based natural resource governance through open data and geospatial transparency.

Recognition & Governance

Catalog formal and informal community bodies ensuring long-term tenure, local leadership, and equitable resource management for commons.

Collective Impact

Enables grassroots organizations to contribute village institutions they support, building a cumulative database of national commons stewardship.

Avoiding Duplication

Prevents overlapping interventions by different agencies, ensuring streamlined programmatic design and targeted resource allocation.

Evidence-Based Planning

Provides actionable spatial and tabular datasets for researchers, policy makers, and development practitioners across all levels.

What are Commons?

In India, Commons encompass shared community lands, village forests, pastoral pastures (Gauchars), community tanks, wetlands, and water bodies. Over 350 million rural citizens directly depend on these shared resources for firewood, fodder, seasonal grazing, drinking water, and minor forest produce.

Despite their ecological and economic centrality, commons often face tenure insecurity, encroachment, and exclusion in conventional administrative records. This platform brings visibility to the community institutions that protect, regenerate, and manage these resources every day.

The Act of Commoning

Commoning is not merely about land — it is a vibrant social practice. It embodies collective decision-making, mutual accountability, fair resource rationing, conflict resolution, and voluntary community stewardship.

A Village Institution is the living embodiment of commoning: community members gathering under a Gram Sabha or user committee to establish seasonal harvest bans, safeguard groundwater recharge zones, and maintain shared assets for future generations.

"Commons sustain life when community governance ensures that resources are neither privatized nor neglected, but nurtured in perpetuity."
Resource Classification

Types of Commons & Management Bodies

Village Institutions cataloged on the platform are categorized by ecological resource domain:

Forest Commons
Gram Van Samiti & CFR Committees

Institutions managing village forests, Joint Forest Management (JFM) plots, and Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights under the Forest Rights Act (FRA 2006).

Pasture Commons
Gauchar & Pasture Samitis

Village bodies governing common grazing pastures, silvopasture enclosures, migratory livestock routes, and seasonal fodder reserves.

Water Commons
Pani Panchayat & Talav Samitis

Water user associations, community pond (Talav/Pokhar) committees, check dam user groups, and groundwater recharge monitoring councils.

Revenue Wastelands
Wasteland Restoration Bodies

Community institutions restoring degraded revenue wastelands and ravine belts into productive, green biophysical community assets.

Platform Architecture

Stakeholder Roles & Data Governance

A multi-stakeholder governance architecture ensuring public access, verified survey records, and institutional coordination.

Public Explorer
Open access for citizens, researchers, and public agencies to explore GIS maps, search administrative boundaries, and inspect institutional records without authentication.
Field User
Grassroots enumerators and village facilitators. Digitize new Village Institutions, capture geospatial boundaries, and record community governance indicators.
Organization Admin
Partner NGO team leads. Coordinate field data collection teams, manage organization field users, and oversee regional coverage across operational blocks.
Super Admin
Central administrators. Review and approve submitted Village Institutions in the verification pipeline, manage partner organizations, and oversee data downloads.

Ready to Explore India's Commons?

Browse through thousands of community-governed Village Institutions, analyze land type distributions, or partner with us to catalog your local community organizations.

Open Map Workspace