forest right conflict,,,,revenue village and forest village

Why in NEWs:

• The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act,2006 (FRA)clarified that these communities had the sole right to sell proceeds from forests but this has been the subject of an ongoing tussle between Maharashtra’s Forest Department and the Union ministry of tribal affairs.
  
• Recently tribal affairs ministry agreed to hand over control of forest management to the state’s forest department, after having initially insisted that tribal communities had exclusive rights over trade in forest produce.
  
• This is yet another instance that highlights how the implementation of PESA and FRA have been fraught with challenges--many of them genuine and yet many others a consequence of bureaucratic and political inertia, incompetence and malice.

Background:

• In 2014, the state government had passed regulations that ensured its forest department retained control over forest management, which includes the large-scale trade and sale of forest produce. The tribal affairs ministry found this in violation of FRA, which empowers tribals and other forest-dwellers to hold sole rights to manage the forests, including sale of forest produce in areas where they have traditional claims. The tribal affairs ministry repeatedly told Maharashtra that its rules were prima facie in violation of and irreconcilable with the law.
  
• Tribal  ministry had previously concluded that only tribals and other forest dwellers had rights to manage their forests under FRA.
  
• But after a meeting in November, 2015 at the Cabinet Secretariat between the environment and the tribal affairs ministries, the latter has made a turnaround and re-interpreted the legal provisions of FRA to give the state government control back over the forests with some conditions.

Timeline May 13, 2014: Maharashtra government notifies the Indian Forests (Maharashtra) (Regulation of assignment, management and cancellation of village forests) Rules, 2014, also called the Village Forest Rules. August 13, 2014: MoTA issues a letter stating that the Rules were prima facie in violation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006. August 19, 2014: MoTA receives communication from Ministry of Rural Department (MoRD), Panchayati Raj and Drinking Water and Sanitation and also the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) asking it to withdraw the letter. December 5, 2014: MoTA tells the principal secretary (forest), Government of Maharashtra, that the said rules encroach upon and are irreconcilable with the provisions of FRA and Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA). January 21, 2015: MoTA receives communication from the chief minister of Maharashtra, informing it that legal opinion is in favour of Village Forest Rules, as rendered by Senior Advocate PinkiAnand. April 8, 2015: MoTA receives a copy of the legal opinion. May 19, 2015: MoTA provides point-by-point rebuttal of the legal opinion and reiterates its stand that VFR is in direct conflict with provisions of FRA. November 27, 2015: MoTA does a u-turn and states that the overlapping provisions of VFR and FRA must be harmoniously construed. December 8, 2015: MoTA issues another memorandum endorsing that a Gram Sabha could pass a resolution stating that no forest rights are likely to be claimed.

Forest Rights Act: The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 is a result of the protracted struggle by the marginal and tribal communities of our country to assert their rights over the forestland over which they were traditionally dependent. This Act is crucial to the rights of millions of tribals and other forest dwellers in different parts of our country as it provides for the restitution of deprived forest rights across India, including both individual rights to cultivated land in forestland and community rights over common property resources.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE 2006 ACT

• For the first time Forest Rights Act recognises and secures
  
• Community Rights or rights over common property resources of the communities in addition to their individual rights
  
• Rights in and over disputed land Rights of settlement and conversion of all forest villages, old habitation, un-surveyed villages and other villages in forests into revenue villages.
  
• Right to protect, regenerate or conserve or manage any community forest resource which the communities have been traditionally protecting and conserving for sustainable use.
  
• Right to intellectual property and traditional knowledge related to biodiversity and cultural diversity
  
• Rights of displaced communities
  
• For empowerment of these communities, the FRA clarified further that these communities had the sole right to sell proceeds from forests.
  
• Right to hold and live in the forestland under the individual or common occupation for habitation or for self, cultivation for livelihood
  
• Rights which are recognized under any state law or laws of any autonomous district council or are accepted as rights under any traditional or customary law of the concerned tribes of any state.
• Right to in-situ rehabilitation including alternative land in cases where the STs and other traditional forest dwellers have been illegally displaced form forestland.

Challenges in FRA’sImplementation

• The process of documenting tribal claims is not an easy one, involving democratically constituted gram sabhas (village assemblies) as per the provisions of the 73rd constitutional amendment on panchayati raj and PESA. This is compounded by the ongoing power struggle between the bureaucracy and tribal communities--one that the latter is likely to lose unless there is robust political intervention on their behalf. One of the manifestations of this has been a limited interpretation of the acts, with governments recognising only individual property and not community ownership of land. This is sometimes attributed to a lack of evidence on the ground for the stated joint ownership.
  
• A lot of ambiguity had been observed in the formation of Forest Rights Committee. In many states the panchayat system is not very strong and in some cases the panchayat elections are not held regularly. In that case the Gram panchayats are not operational up to the desired level necessary for implementation of the Act. The target people are primarily tribal and the Gram panchayat responsible for the formation of Forest Rights Committee comprising of these people are not efficient enough to implement the Act in letter and spirit.
  
• The Gram Sabha/ Forest Rights Committee have to receive all types of claims of rights and document it with proper receiving, but in most of the states the Gram Sabha/ FRC do not have desired infrastructure and technical know how to keep these records
  
• The main target group of this Act are mostly illiterate and therefore filling and submission of forms regarding the claims becomes very difficult. In this situation many middleman and some bad elements starts operating with vested interest.
  
• There is lack of awareness about Community Forest Resource provisions among local communities as well as government officials. The act provides right on thirteen different types of community rights but only two or three rights are often seen to be claimed and without proper corroboration, which often led to rejection of claim.
  
• Community Forest Resource claiming process is complex and several evidences are often asked to be filled by officials. The evidences are needed to be collected from Revenue Department and forest department. In most cases information are not available for public domain and need to be collected through Right To Information Act. These procedures are difficult for the communities to handle. Therefore most of the time the claims are found pending because of lack of evidences.
  
• As per the provision in Act it’s the responsibilities of the government department to provide required documents to the individual & communities as evidence but it is not taken up by the concerned departments. The person seeking rights individual or community have to struggle hard to get a piece of evidence.
  
• In absence of authentic records of evidence in situation discussed above the role of revenue and forest departments becomes very important and the actual eligible people also have to face serious problems in claiming rights for them.
  
• The tribal department has been declared as the nodal department for enactment of this Act, but the records for the forest lands are in possession of either forest department or the revenue department. In view of this situation it is really very difficult to have a good liasioning between all three departments i.e. the tribal welfare department, the revenue department and the forest department.
  
• In most of the cases the meeting of Gram Sabha is not organised in accordance with the requirements of the Act, again attracting the role of the middle man or official of revenue or tribal welfare department.
  
• Receiving the claims and its verification needs involvement of the Forest Rights Committee, the claimant, revenue official and forest officials. The liasioning among all these stakeholders is an extremely difficult task. In fact this is the most difficult activity as far as the implementation of Forest Rights Act is concerned since none of the above departments work together. One very importants activity at this stage is the preparation of map for which technical expertise is a must. Thus the verification of claims and preparation of maps in the most serious bottleneck in implementation of this Act. The authentic maps are also not available in many cases again attracting the intervention of revenues or forest department.
  
• It is also very difficult for villagers (Forest Rights Committee) from remote areas to travel large distance to submit the claims to the Sub-divisional level Committee. In such cases the district collectors and sub-divisional officers have to authorise the official of welfare department to receive the claims from the Forest Rights Committee but then it is difficult to track the station of those claims as in most cases the officials are ignorant and claims are not forwarded in time.
  
• In most of the states the authentic data regarding the occupation of land before the cut off date i.e. 13.12.2005 such as remote sensing maps etc. are not available for whole area thereby creating a major problem in ascertaining the claims for rights over the land.
  
• In protected areas, the process of claiming right is continuing but due to lack of organization, there are efforts to illegally relocate them.
  
• In some cases sub-divisional level committee arbitrarily rejects claims on the basis of superfluous criteria and lack of evidences. At this stages also there are some confusions regarding the acceptance of the evidence for recognition of rights.
  
• Even at the district level committee there has been cases of serious violation such as.(a)The titles were distributed with reduction in extent of resources claimed, moreover the rights were granted on very few common property like grazing land, water bodies and Non Timber Forest Produce. Habitation rights and other such important rights are ignored.(b)The customary rights and traditional boundary are ignored in provided titles for unilateral reduction in size of land.(c) GPS technologies are abused to manipulate maps and areas for which titles are being given.(d) It is also seen that few cases are hanged between Forest Rights Act, 2006 and Sub Divisional Level Committee and are not taken to District Level Committee for further action.(e) Both IR and CFR rights are denied to Other Traditional Forest dwellers community.

How it affecting Tribals:
Not recognising common property resources that tribes collectively manage and live off is not only economic injustice, but also breaks the (in many senses, highly evolved) traditional order of tribal societies.

Way ahead to Reform:

• The government has largely struggled to make local governance work in tribal areas. When funds are allocated for local bodies in tribal areas, they are often not accompanied by the requisite hand-holding and capacity building to utilise funds and execute projects. This has been the case even in states like Kerala that are considerably ahead of others when it comes to local governance. Without better infrastructure such as roads and markets, these communities will continue to struggle to make good use of their forest resources.
  
• While the eventual outcome (for the moment) in Maharashtra is disheartening, it is encouraging that the ministry of tribal affairs seems to have campaigned quite hard to protect the rights of tribal communities. Irrespective of the current decision, it leaves behind a paper trail that can be used by officials and activists in future. This is yet another reminder that the ‘state’ is not a monolith, and understanding that enables us to work much better with the state.
  
• Political support is key; and in this instance, the dice was loaded heavily against tribal communities.
  
• Governance in tribal areas suffers from many of the same problems that panchayati raj suffers from, and then some. There is an understandable degree of natural friction between the “development” priorities of the state and the “development” priorities of tribal communities, with a third perspective of the “development” priorities of civil society that is working to improve tribal welfare. Between these competing priorities, the state remains the behemoth, with an ability to invoke its power of eminent domain--part of which it had ceded through PESA and FRA. State’s effort in handling Tribal rights will be key to make it success.