Commons, such as forests, grazing lands, wetlands, wastelands, village commons, and customary community territories, play a critical role in sustaining livelihoods, biodiversity, cultural identity, and local governance systems across India. Despite their importance, India lacks a universally accepted definition of commons and there is no standard framework to classify, map, and understand community-held lands and associated rights.

This project was undertaken by Landstack to develop a rights-based typology framework for commons in India. The initiative sought to bridge the gap between legal classifications, land-use categories, customary systems, and community tenure arrangements by creating a framework that could support national and global efforts to document community lands.

The project was developed in collaboration with the World Resources Institute (WRI) Landmark initiative, which maps Indigenous Peoples' and community lands globally. Since Indian commons are recognised through multiple legal, customary, and administrative systems, the project examined how different categories of lands and associated rights could be classified and represented within a coherent national framework.

The work combined legal review, land-use analysis, forest governance assessment, rights analysis, and spatial mapping to identify different categories of commons and the bundles of rights associated with them. It also explored opportunities to integrate Community Forest Resource (CFR) data, forest governance information, and land-use datasets into spatially explicit commons mapping systems.