Forest rights, communities and conservation

For much of India's modern forest history, forest law treated forest dwellers as encroachers on state land, even when their families had lived in and used those forests for generations. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, commonly called the Forest Rights Act, was enacted to correct what its preamble calls a historical injustice. It recognises rights over forest land and resources for forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who depended on forests before 13 December 2005.

The Act recognises individual rights, such as habitation and self-cultivation up to 4 hectares, and community rights, including grazing, fishing, access to water bodies and collection of minor forest produce. Its most far-reaching provision is the community forest resource right: the right of a Gram Sabha to protect, regenerate, conserve or manage its community forest resource. The Gram Sabha initiates claims, which are then screened at sub-divisional and district levels.

The Supreme Court's 2013 decision in the Niyamgiri case, Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests, strengthened the Gram Sabha's role by holding that the consent of the Gram Sabha was required before forest land could be diverted for mining in that case. Implementation, however, has been uneven: supporters point to villages that now manage their own forests, while researchers and officials report rejected claims, slow recognition of community rights and tension with tiger-reserve and diversion decisions.

The underlying question is not whether people or forests matter more. Forests that local people have a legal stake in are often better patrolled, less prone to fire and encroachment, and more likely to survive political change. Conservation that ignores rights tends to produce conflict; rights without conservation duties can degrade the same forest. The Act tries to join the two by giving rights holders a duty to protect biodiversity and catchments.