Concept Note - Rights and Resources Initiative

documentary evidence again outside states like Himachal and to an extent Kerala but otherwise those
that we are talking of a legal review that came into place almost a hundred years ago. The documentary
evidence even today is hard to come by. So the net result is that all rights are effectively denied to
adivasis, dalits and other marginalized communities, those whose rights were recognized tended to be
upper class and powerful communities. Whenever you leave enormous power to the hands full of
selected bureaucrats the net result is that. If you have no way to hold them accountable, then they do
not do their job. That’s the most common
experience and the result in this case is the
settlement process is not actually been done.
Even the limited, distorted, absurd procedure
that is in the Indian Forests Act has not even
been completed in most of India’s forest area.
Madhya Pradesh in 2005 informed that most of
its forests have not been surveyed. In Odisha,
40% , 60% of National parks, 60% of sanctuaries
have not completed their process. Sometimes
after more than 30 years. So what this creates
on the ground is that you have in the name of
the government forest you actually have a sort
of fantasy is that huge areas are declared National Parks or Sanctuaries or Reserved Forests in which
people are not supposed to have right but in fact they do have rights and they do continue to live in that
area. They do continue to use that area but on paper they don’t exist. So you put literally crores of
people that is tens of millions of people into a situational legal limbo. Dr B. D Sharma who should have
come this morning, when he was the Tribal Commissioner of Scheduled tribes in 1989 said, in his report
that you have criminalized the livelihood of entire community, because you have reduced them to the
status where they do not exist on paper and their very life is a criminal life. Now having already created
this problem, after 1980 we see this problem greatly intensifies because the already highly controlled
system of forest management under the Forest Department now gets highly hyper centralized after
1980. The first in 1980, the Forest Conservation Act is passed under which it is illegal to use any forest
land for non-forest purposes without permission from the Central Governments and Environment
Ministry. So the State Governments lose all power of it and everything comes to Delhi. I am not going to
go into details on the process of forests clearance because we won’t have time for that but the process
effectively unlike every other process of research takeover in India including that under the 1894 Land
Acquisition Act or the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, all pay at least lip service to inviting
objections. Under the Forest Conservation Act there is nothing at all, the whole proceeding is between
the State Government Forest Department, the Central Environment Ministry and the concerned project
proponent which might be a private company or might be a government agency. In fact the committee
that decides these matters in the Central Government is the Forest Advisory Committee does not even
allow a local committee or anyone else to appear before it. The only people who are allowed to appear
before it are the State Government and the company or the agency that wants the land. So
unsurprisingly this leads to the 97% of all projects who seek forest clearance receive it and certainly
there is never any consideration paid for people’s rights which I will come back to. So this is also a hyper
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