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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Why forest rights matter - Rajshree Chandra

Why forest rights matter - Rajshree Chandra

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published Published on Mar 20, 2018   modified Modified on Mar 20, 2018
-The Indian Express

The demand is a call for upholding local practices of belonging

On March 12, about 50,000 farmers reached Mumbai, walking 165 km in the hope that their elected representatives would listen when they spoke. A majority of these farmers were Adivasis and one of their demands was the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and through it, their land rights.

The FRA was enacted in 2006 with the aim of protecting the claims of tribal communities over tracts of land or forests they have inhabited and cultivated for generations. It has the potential to democratise forest governance by recognising community forest resource rights over an estimated 85.6 million acres, thereby empowering over 200 million forest dwellers in over 1,70,000 villages. However, the FRA’s future is precariously balanced between the democratic control and protection of forests on the one hand and rapacious corporations backed by an unscrupulous political class on the other. It has become the site of a deep conflict. That is why it becomes important to understand what is at stake with the FRA.

The FRA has two distinct features. First, it seeks to restore individual and/or community rights of forest dwellers over land and forest resources. These rights include title rights, user rights, forest management rights and relief and development rights. Second, it devolves power to village-level gram sabhas to contest and exclude the alienation of land in the Scheduled areas.

Recourse to the FRA has enabled village and tribal communities in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tripura to veto the land-acquisitions claims of corporations and state governments. It expands the mandate of the Fifth and the Sixth Schedules of the Constitution that protect the claims of indigenous communities over tracts of land or forests they inhabit. It shifts the focus from a propertied “owner”, to a space that surrounds the subject and onto the broader networks of relations that interact to form property. It thus gives jurisdiction to a different practice of “belonging”, where the person and her land — the part and the whole — become indistinguishable.

We witnessed the articulation of this “belonging” during our fieldwork in Raigarh and in the testimonies of Dongaria Konds of the Niyamgiri region (Lanjigarh district, Odisha). “Development” cannot be a pre-moulded receptacle devoid of heterogeneous practices and peoples.

In 2013, in compliance with the SC ruling and in observance of the FRA provisions, all 10 selected gram sabhas vetoed the Vedanta bauxite mining project in and around the Niyamgiri mountains. In Kunakadu, a tribal hamlet in Kalahandi, an animated Tunguru Majhi, appointed as observer to the village council proceedings by the SC, spoke for 20 minutes, directing his words at the district judge: “Jharna, pani, paban, patra … sob loss haijibo” (streams, water, air, leaves … everything will be lost).

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The Indian Express, 17 March, 2018, http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/maharashtra-farmers-protest-why-forest-rights-matter-5100519/


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