Birds Of Burden
Why did the chicken cross the road? Simple. It wanted to bypass the forest official. Otherwise charcoal would never reach the town and poor would starve for the lack of a livelihood.
In the early 1980s, St Xavier's Behavioural Science Centre, an Ahmedabad-based NGO, encouraged poor farmers living in the highly-saline Bhal area of Gujarat to plant Prosopis juliflora which grows well in the region. The villagers wanted to convert the wood into charcoal and sell it. Prosopis wood produces excellent charcial. But transit passes are required to transport the charcoal. With no forest officials in the neighbourhood, getting the permit became an almost impossible task for the villagers. The alternative was offering a chicken to the officials to get them to come and witness the felling and give the pass. Another way to deal with the problem would have been to get the state to exempt the wood altogether. But forest officials argue that many state-owned forest areas in Gujarat are also full of P juliflora and it would be impossible to tell whether the wood had come from state-owned forests or private plantations. As a result, anybody wanting to cut P juliflora, literally a weed which has colonised large parts of the country, needs a transit pass.