-The Business Standard Against nodal ministry's protest, under PMO guidance, MoEF prepares to largely remove need for gram sabha agreement to use or give away forest land The central government is set to dilute the rights of tribals and other forest-dwelling communities, doing away with the present legal need for their consent while handing over their forest land to industry in large parts of the country. Business Standard has reviewed documents that detail...

-The Hindustan Times Continuing with its business-friendly regulatory changes, the Narendra Modi government has brought in a key change diminishing the applicability of watershed Forest Rights Act (FRA) for seeking statutory forest clearance for projects. The environment ministry has exempted plantations, notified as forests within 75 years of the FRA coming into force on 13 December 2005 - and not having tribal population as per 2001 and 2011 census - from the...

-Outlook In addition to amending the Rules of the Forest Rights Act, greater attention needs to be paid to changing the Land Acquisition Act   There is no explicit provision in the Forest Rights Act, 2006 for obtaining permission of the gram sabha for diversion of forest lands to non-forest purposes. However, Section 4(5) of the Act prevents government to evict any forest dweller unless the recognition process as provided in the...

-The Indian Express Moves to dilute labour-material ratio in MGNREGA and focus exclusively on select backward blocks will adversely impact rural poor. Before the general elections, free-market fundamentalists had lobbied fiercely to reshape so-called wasteful social-sector expenditures. Primary among their targets was the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which, according to them, should become an unconditional cash transfer scheme. Post-elections, the late Gopinath Munde's espousal of the MGNREGA went...

-PTI Amidst opposition in several quarters to its plan to tweak the rural job scheme, NDA government on Thursday asserted that it would go ahead with MGNREGA reforms as it charged that the flagship programme of the previous UPA regime "was allowed to be exploited for purely partisan purposes". "The tendencies of acquiring easy money and using government funds for political party promotion could be curbed only when a spirited team of...