Concept Note - Rights and Resources Initiative

ights, give it a legal empowerment to that particular right, then it becomes extremely difficult
for the government to reverse that particular right.
I do think that the existence of FRA and PESA will continue to be a rallying opportunity for the
people who are wishing to fight for the rights of the poor in this particular country. From the two
very able colleagues who have come from outside of our country, it is very interesting that
though the motivations were so different, one was the motivation was basically how to protect
forests in China, the motivation was human rights in Brazil but they both reached to the same
conclusion of granting rights to the people and that’s why if you look at the literature the
countries which have actually done a very successful job of recognition of right, providing it the
security in the law and enforcing that right. The countries that come to mind are- Finland,
Mexico and Sweden. If you really look at them, they are deriving multiple benefits from it. Not
only their forests are protected, not only are their communities’ livelihood and incomes higher,
the surprising thing is the governments’ taxation revenue is higher from those areas because the
people are rich and that’s precisely what should happen and therefore, just to imagine that the
pathway to prosperity has to be by displacing these people does not seem to be correct because
they are the living examples in the world that you don’t have to displace people by telling them
that we are displacing you because we want to develop you. That’s not the philosophy which is
going to work because there are examples in which they themselves find the pathways and you
also find the urban people who require much greater let’s say utilization for the commodities will
also find a pathway only by working with those sets of people. Unfortunately, very frankly
speaking I do not have a clear pathway forward but I do think we have the rallying points. We do
think that the resistance and the mobilization and the organisation of the communities as
reflected in the conflict map is something to be proud of, is something which we could utilize in
the future.
I’ll close here
.
Thank you very much.
Viren-I thank you all for your patience and participation in this conference. There were very
interesting questions and we’ll be documenting the proceedings which we’ll circulate to all of
you.
Thank You.
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