A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 265Who’s Encroaching? Forest Peoples and the LawMilestones in the state’s efforts to appropriateland from forest-dependent communitiesin India include the Indian ForestAct of 1878 and the 1980 Forest ConservationAct, which theoretically provided thecentral government with ultimate controlover most forest land.In 2002, quoting a Supreme Court ruling,the Ministry of Environment and Forestsissued a circular to all state/union territorygovernments to evict all ‘encroachers’from forest land. Between March 2002 andMarch 2004, it is estimated that ‘encroachers’were evicted from 152,000 hectares offorest land, although neither the SupremeCourt nor the MoEF had clarified whetherthe term included people carrying out illegal,commercial logging activities, orAdivasi people, or both. In 2002, an estimated10 million Adivasi people faced thethreat of eviction. The new wave of evictionsis helping to create conditions conducivefor commercial carbon forestry.On 23 December 2004, however, the MoEFissued a further circular confessing thatdue to the lack of definition of ‘encroacher’,many Adivasi people had been unjustlyevicted from their lands. Moreover, followingheightened protest by Adivasis andsupport organisations in late 2004, the centralgovernment agreed in early 2005 to introducethe Scheduled Tribes and ForestDwellers (Recognition of Forests Rights)Bill before Parliament. The Bill would provideAdivasi communities with legal recognitionof their forest rights in areas of traditionaloccupation and use. It would alsohelp regularise lands being cultivated byAdivasis, convert so-called forest villages 91to revenue villages (with title deeds), andsettle disputed land claims.But Adivasi and support organisations stillhave to fight to prevent the Bill being dilutedbefore it is passed by Parliament.Communities interviewed in Harda in 2004 said that VFPC chairmenand committee members have become to a large extent ‘the ForestDepartment’s men’.What’s wrong with that?These local JFM bodies are accused of imposing unjust and unwantedpolicies on their own communities, of undermining traditionalmanagement systems and of marginalising traditional and formal selfgoverninglocal village authorities. 89 In one case in Madhya Pradesh,forest authorities and the police shot dead villagers opposing JFM andVFPC policies, in an echo of hostilities between the Forest Departmentand various classes of other forest users that go back a century(see box above).According to many Mass Tribal Organisations, communities and activists,JFM was effectively imposed on them without appropriate