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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Missing the forest for the trees-Shankar Gopalakrishnan

Missing the forest for the trees-Shankar Gopalakrishnan

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published Published on Jun 19, 2012   modified Modified on Jun 19, 2012
-The Indian Express

Tribal affairs minister’s letter to states on the Forest Rights Act highlights the problems of implementation

For most observers, the Forest Rights Act (FRA) is just another “welfare” law. It is often trotted out as one of those “development measures” that ought to be implemented, but isn’t. Recently, Minister for Tribal Affairs V. Kishore Chandra Deo wrote to state governments, taking them to task for tardy implementation of the FRA. The problem, we are told, is one of “governance failure”: officials are not doing their jobs. But reality is not so simple. The problems in the implementation of the FRA go well beyond official apathy. They cut to a key problem confronting India today: who should decide, and how, about how this country’s natural resources are used?

In India’s forests, this issue is far from new. In 1865, the British created the first Forest Act; its 1927 avatar is still India’s main forest law. Their purpose was to secure control over India’s vast timber resources. The act gives forest officials sweeping powers over any area of land declared a government “forest.” In some areas (known as reserved forests) no one can have any rights, except those few that may have been recorded during an opaque, rarely completed, “settlement” process. The British said this expropriation was necessary for “scientific” management, by which they meant management of timber. Even today, the forest department’s working plans talk mainly about timber; officials refer to non-timber forest produce as “minor” and the forest clearance process assumes that a natural forest can be replaced by a tree plantation — a true case of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Today, almost a quarter of India’s land area is recorded as forest. Millions of tribals and forest dwellers were deemed “encroachers” on their own lands, and their livelihoods equated with criminal activity, during the century-long process of declaration of government forests. In undivided Madhya Pradesh alone, an estimated 95 lakh hectares of community forests were seized. In Thane district of Maharashtra, as early as 1878, the Bombay Forest Commission recorded that 4 lakh hectares of adivasi grazing lands had been converted to reserved and protected forest. It is not an accident that tribals are the most marginalised community in India today.

After decades of protest, and a final bitter controversy, the FRA was passed in 2006 in order to address — as per its preamble — the “historical injustice” inflicted on tribals and forest dwellers. It provides for recognition of the pre-existing rights of forest dwellers. These rights include title to the land they have been cultivating (provided the cultivation started prior to December 2005); community rights over minor forest produce, water bodies, and grazing areas; and rights to manage and protect their forests. Most importantly, it mandated that both the recognition process and forest management more generally had to be done through a democratic process, starting at the level of each village.

But in the years since, the act has been actively sabotaged. Claims by forest dwellers about their land rights have been rejected in hordes, often for illegal reasons (such as the claimant’s name not being on prior forest department “encroacher” lists). Non-land and community rights have hardly been recognised at all. Both Central and state governments carry on making forest management policies in direct violation of the act. Plantations have been undertaken on forest dwellers’ lands, lakhs of hectares of forest have been handed over to companies illegally, and evictions of forest dwellers continue. In every state the process under the act has been violated.

Behind these myriad problems lies one fundamental issue. For too long, officials in forest areas have had enormous powers — and those who lived in them have had none. Such a situation benefitted a lot of interests, all of whom now resist the FRA. Forest officials do not want it because it endangers their control over forests and forest dwellers. Industries do not want it because it threatens their easy access to forest land. Some conservationists do not want it because it undermines their view that conservation consists of excluding all people except officials, tourists and themselves. In sum, the FRA threatens all those who, for whatever reason, find democratic and collective resource control a problem. In this sense, the FRA stalemate symbolises a much bigger problem in India today, one that goes beyond forests alone.

The writer is with Campaign for Survival and Dignity, Delhi

The Indian Express, 19 June, 2012, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/missing-the-forest-for-the-trees/963599/0


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