It is not surprising that the national committee on forest rights Act, headed by National Advisory Council member N C Saxena, has found the implementation of this landmark tribal welfare legislation “terrible”. Even three years after the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act came into force, as many as 11 states have not even begun implementing it. In most other states, execution is woefully poor. As a result, the statute’s basic objective of undoing the historic injustice done to the adivasis (tribals) and other forest dwellers under the colonial forest laws is not being served. The new legislation recognises the forest dwellers’ right to homestead, cultivable and grazing land and non-timber forest produce. Significantly, it gives the forest communities the right to manage the forestlands traditionally used by them, thus, ending the forest departments’ absolute hegemony over forests. This has predictably irked the forest officials as well as conservationists. Several other provisions of the law have also been subject of some controversy. That many states have their own reservations over the law points to the inherent limitation of legislating rights from New Delhi when the responsibility to implement remains with the states.
In this case, moreover, loopholes and ambiguities in the Act have made matters worse, enabling the abuse of the law. In several areas, forest officials forcibly evicted forest dwellers in a bid to keep control over the forests, in many others, outsiders encroached upon forests in the hope of getting land titles on the enforcement of the law. In some cases, land mafias also used forest dwellers as fronts to grab land. The Saxena panel has identified several flaws in the law that are being used to deny the forest residents full benefits of this legislation. One such is the definition of “other traditional forest dwellers” which is open to misinterpretation. Another is the loose description of “community rights” over forest areas, which aims at transferring the management of some forest areas to local communities.
There is a mismatch of approaches of conservationists, who want zero human interference in forests, and traditional forest dwellers, who rely on forests for their livelihood. This much is evident even from a reading of the Saxena panel report to which many of the panel members have appended their notes of dissent! These notes raise serious questions about the key recommendations of the panel’s report, including the suggestion of a three-tier forest management system that will allow some part of forests to be under exclusive control of local communities, some under joint community-government management and the remaining under forest departments. However, the one recommendation that merits serious implementation is the one relating to community awareness. Beneficiaries of the Act must be made aware of their rights and entitlements, and forest officials should be sensitised to their livelihood concerns. In the light of the Saxena report, the statute must now be revisited and suitably amended.
