A core premise of the protests against colonial forestry and the postindependence re-emergence of forest rights movements is that rural communities are strongly dependent upon forests for meeting their subsistence and income needs. Given this strong dependence and deep cultural ties, it is argued that depriving them of access to forests will harm rural livelihoods and lives very substantially. This idea of dependence was recognized to a small extent even by the British, when they yielded some concessions to farmers in certain pockets as far apart as Kumaon in the Himalayas and Uttara Kannada in the Western Ghats. And it was re-iterated time and again in the post-Chipko discourse (see for example, Fernandes 1988), and made one of the pillars of the argument for granting rights to local communities to manage forests.1 While there is much debate about the adequacy of joint forest management (JFM) as a response to this demand (see Chapter 1 in this volume) and the merits of the Forest Rights Act 2006 (FRA) as an alternative (see Chapter 3 in this volume), there has been relatively little examination of the core assumption of forest-dependence on which all such approaches rest.