-VillageSquare.in The residents of Rampura, a small village in the buffer zone of the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, have been asked to move. But, they say, with no allocation of alternative land, where will they go? “If they come to destroy our houses with elephants, we’ll throw all our belongings and our children into the pond, form a circle and ask them to shoot us, but we will not leave...

-The Hindu Sabotaging the Forest Rights Act damages democracy Since 1980, through the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has “diverted for non-forest use” (bureaucratese for destroyed) over 1.5 million hectares of forest. How many Adivasis and forest-dwellers have been evicted by this ‘lawful’ forest destruction? Stripping these forests has yielded thousands of crores of rupees for corporations to which a bulk of these forestlands...

-News18.com Considering how governments have handed forests to destructive industries, why don't these wildlife-first organisations demand the Eviction of the Forest Departments from forest lands? Imagine people who live in clearings inside an extensive dense forest, cultivating paddy, harvesting grass, bamboo, and mushrooms, and hunting the occasional deer. They stay awake at night, beating drums to tell their elephant brothers not to come for their hard-earned crop. Once the harvest is over,...

-Hindustan Times The claims are by tribal or pastoral communities seeking community rights over forest land they have inhabited for generations. Out of 4.224 million claims received, only 1.894 million titles have been distributed, 1.939 million have been rejected and a little less than 400,000 are still being assessed. One out of every two claims made since 2007 by forest dwellers under the Forest Rights Act has been rejected, data from...

-TheWire.in Issues tied to forest governance require a collaborative approach rather than narrow court action on the Forest Rights Act. The Supreme Court order related to the “Eviction” of tribal and forest-dwelling communities has made big news. The February 13 order directing state governments to initiate action against all those with “rejected” claims has reignited longstanding ideological disputes over India’s forest governance. Reactions to the recent order in a case filed by Wildlife...