Undoing Historical Injustice? Critical Reflections on India’s Forest Rights Act,2006

Introduction

Does the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006—or the Forest Rights Act (FRA), as it is popularly known—redress the historical injustice against forest dwellers? More importantly, does it adequately address what constitutes historical injustice for forest dwellers? It is essential to raise these questions, as the FRA gave forest dwellers the hope that their association with forests would finally be respected. Even policymakers have celebrated the Act as a paradigm shift. To quote the Joint Secretary, Ashok Pai, Ministry of Tribal Affairs,

The FRA has brought a paradigm shift in the forest law, which has existed for almost one and half centuries, bringing the people who were ‘offenders’ into their rightful place as right holders. From ‘encroachers’ who needed to be ‘evicted’, the forest dwellers have been recognised as ‘integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem’. The chasm, which separated forest dwelling communities from such rightful place, has been recognised as the ‘historical injustice’ which the FRA sets out to correct. (Pai, 2015, p. 1)

How can this gap that separates forest dwellers from their rightful place be filled? What is their rightful place? Is the paradigm shift supported by changes in the institutional processes and practices that dominate forest areas? Before initiating a discussion on this, it would be useful to get an idea about the circumstances that led to the formulation of the Act.

Madhu Sarin (2008) argues that there are thousands of illegal occupants of forestland who are threatened with eviction regularly by the forest department and by other private and commercial interests and that they would now be able, with legal occupancy of such land, to stand up to such intimidation. According to her, the FRA was ‘akin’ to recognising ‘their citizenship rights 60 years after independence’ (Sarin, 2008, p. 9).

It is unclear how the Act, apparently an outcome of a campaign, translated into policy despite opposition within government circles. Moreover, what is the model of governance it introduces? A detailed reading of the background that led to the formulation of the Act reveals the lack of coordination, and tensions, within local bureaucracies in forest areas (Sarin, 2008). Indecisive initiatives by the forest department to first grant pattas—title deeds to property—to forest dwellers for the occupied land and initiate an eviction spree point toward the mayhem and collapse of governance in forest areas (Sarin, 2008). It exposes the longstanding friction in forest areas and the social distance between local governments and forest dwellers. The Act, in this sense, seems to add fuel to the fire. It formalised the conflict between tribal forest dwellers, forest departments and private interests (Bhullar, 2008; Reddy et al., 2010). ¹

While the FRA recognises forest dwellers’ land and community rights, it subjects them to the same apparatus that has historically undermined their relationship with forests. How then does this Act redress the historical injustice committed against forest dwellers? Where do we locate the historical injustice towards forest dwellers?

Historical Injustice and Tribes: Text and Context

One of the fundamental requirements in any context of historical injustice is to awaken the historical conception of time, the ‘qualitative otherness of times past’ that ‘presses into the consciousness of the present’ (Heidegger, 1978, p. 8). In the case of forest dwellers, recalling this ‘qualitative otherness’ involves an engagement with their remembering of the past and how the past continues to relate to their life worlds and ‘to things that matter’ (Casey, 2000, p. xxii). The history invoked in expressions of historical injustice is where the past is imminent in the present. Eviction from land and forests and disregard for their way of life have been an integral part of tribal history in India. Tribal forest dwellers continue to live in fear of eviction, even though it has been fifteen years since the FRA came into being. The state’s role is writ large in this history and experience of marginalisation. So the first step toward redressing historical injustice entails acknowledging the damage caused to tribal forest dwellers and engaging with the memory of this injustice (Stauffer, 2015).

Historical injustice does not belong only to the remote past. It is an integral part of the present, evinced in the discontinuities it introduces in the lives of the present generation of forest dwellers, in how they relate to their history of loss and humiliation, and its bearing on the life choices and chances available to them. In the case of the FRA, the admission of historical injustice did not lead to the admission of fault and responsibility. It has not led to any official documentation of the damage caused to forest dwellers and the denigration of their culture and way of life. No official recorded testimonies of tribal forest dwellers note the innumerable injustices against them that continue to this day. There has been no systematic assessment of the socio-political and legal dynamics that encumber their diverse circumstances. Forest dwellers remain mere spectators in this supposed effort at making amends. The root of the injustices lies in this othering of tribal forest dwellers from the processes that concern them.

At best, the FRA is an appeal to move on or for forgetting in the name of the future and reconciliation. It alludes to ‘conscious forgetting’ in the name of ‘democracy and emancipation’ and expects forest dwellers to relinquish ‘remembrance and retribution’ for future-oriented policy (Bevernage, 2008, p. 154). The FRA exemplifies this conscious forgetting of enduring injustices against tribes. It is a plea to move on and ‘let bygones be bygones’, as though forgetting could restore all that has been lost and undo the anomalies that systemic exploitation has introduced in the lives of those who carry the burden of a fractured past. It forecloses possibilities of dialogue on ascertaining the nature of historical injustice and the probable course for reparation.

The historical injustice against tribes is quintessentially civilisational. They have been victims of the politics of time and are at the receiving end of history. Personifying a past traversed by the civilised world, tribes represented the remnants of previous stages of human evolution and a ‘people without history’ (Smith, 1999; Wolf, 1982). This arrangement of cultures in a hierarchy representing a succession in time stemmed from a deep-seated intolerance of cultural diversity. Their culturally diverse ways have been perceived as archaic or an antidote to the endless quest for human progress. Historical injustice for tribal forest dwellers lies in the refusal to accept them as contemporaries, coinhabiting disparate temporalities at any given time (Bevernage, 2008; Fabian, 1983; Hebbar, 2018; Savyasaachi, 2016). It manifests in the disrespect for forest dwellers and their traditional relations with forests, and the distrust between local bureaucracies and forest dwellers. The FRA does little to redress this denial of equality. The FRA’s failure is not just at the level of implementation but also in its intention. The rest of this article elaborates on the lack of prescience in the FRA’s formulation to argue that its desultory approach is an inherent part of its politics, not an extraneous feature.

Methodology

This article draws on in-depth interviews, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in different research sites at various times, in the period 1996–2001 in south Bihar and later Jharkhand; 2003–2006 in Maharashtra; 2010–2012 in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, undivided Andhra Pradesh and Kerala; and 2016–2017 and 2021–2022 in Karnataka. Oral histories and in-depth interviews represent person-centred research techniques that have shifted the focus from observation to listening to people’s voices. These techniques enabled reflexivity in research and collating personal accounts of fear, despair, dispiritedness, hope and survival to comprehend conditions of historical injustice. Multiple research sites and interviews with tribal activists helped establish an account of the experiences of tribes across different regions in India and to challenge some of the presumptions within policy circles about their community life, specifically those living in forest areas. My research on the tribes of south India conducted intermittently over the last ten years has focussed on how tribal forest dwellers have received the Act, their interpretations, and their expectations. The different sites presented distinct contexts but comparable dynamics that challenge sterile conceptions about tribes and their way of life. They helped arrive at a ‘synoptic judgment’ or bring together the relatedness and the context of the problem by ‘discovering and imaginatively reconstructing the life of people’ that could reflect on the situation more intimately (Mink, 1966, p. 27).

The FRA also emerged as one of the critical sites for comprehending the changing political and social dynamics in forest areas. It revealed the various meanings attributed to the term ‘community’ and the strategic use of the term ‘encroacher’ in the context of the Act. One of the most gaping flaws within the Act was its inability to aver forest dwellers’ rights as a conscious recognition of their historical association with forests. The undermining of this spirit of the Act and its implementation is apparent in the extant model of governance in forest areas. The accompanying environmental politics and practices reek of colonial intentions. The tussle for control between multiple stakeholders, such as environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the Joint Forest Management Committees (JFMC) or Vana Samrakshana Samithis (VSS)—consisting of forest department officials, local NGOs, local panchayat leaders, and women and tribal (wherever applicable) representatives—unravel the underbelly of governance in forest areas. ² The following sections elaborate on the ensuing politics and machinations related to the FRA. This politics undermines the Act and comes in the way of its effective implementation. Any discussion on the Act must acknowledge the political nature of the problem and the cultural sensibilities embedded in the ongoing struggle in forest areas over the control and management of forests. The following sections take up each of these identified concerns in detail to reflect on what could, in practice, make way for the ‘paradigm shift’ envisioned in the FRA.

Whither Community?

In an earlier piece, I expressed my apprehension about the FRA’s larger purpose and implications for tribal forest dwellers (Hebbar, 2006). I was concerned about the FRA’s repercussions on the ongoing conflict between forest departments and tribal communities across the country. Having lived and researched in south Jharkhand in the late 1990s and 2000, I witnessed the breakdown of communication between forest officials and tribal communities. During my year-long stay in a village surrounded by a Protected Forest, I never once came across or met any forest official. Following the Jungle Kato Andolan in the late 1980s, the forest department had withdrawn its staff and officials from Protected Forests and many parts of Reserved Forests. ³ Subsequently, local villagers formed forest protection groups (Van Raksha Dals or VRDs) to manage Protected and Reserved Forests. The villagers in my field site had constituted three forest protection groups to manage the forest. There were tremendous differences of opinion on forest management and personal politics across these groups. The Protected Forest included plots of land that were officially recorded in the name of persons in the village but also served as the commons for many of the landless—from this village as well as more distant villages—who were dependent on it for their basic needs (Hebbar, 2011).

The VRDs regularly consulted locals from neighbouring and remote villages interested in managing resources and conserving the Protected Forests. How does the FRA unfold in a context where the idea of community is dynamic and susceptible to realignments within and across villages? There is no clear definition of community in the FRA, even though its text—particularly its amended version after the 2012 notification—contains the phrases ‘community rights’ and ‘community forest resource’. This ambiguity has led to many JFMCs or VSS, specifically in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, claiming community rights. Under the directive of the National Forest Policy 1988, the forest department established JFMCs across the country, involving local communities in preventing forest degradation. However, forest departments dominate the JFMCs and represent competing interests that directly challenge the position of the Gram Sabha (village assembly) (Hebbar, 2011). I also came across instances where the Forest Rights Committee, which was supposed to be set up by the Gram Sabha for preparing the list of claimants, was formalised by the MRO (Mandal Revenue Officer) and the MPDO (Mandal Parishad Development Officer) without the knowledge and participation of the Gram Sabha. ⁴ The concept of community is not just contested but also open to manipulation. There are multiple manifestations of community within a village, corresponding to different occasions, social responsibilities, and political allegiances.

This situation is nowhere near the romantic, idyllic depiction of Gram Sabhas in the context of the FRA (cf. Sarin, 2008, p. 10). It does not reflect the contemporary dynamics of community life and the various constraints forest dwellers face. This lack of engagement with the diverse and changing community dynamics in forest areas glosses over the history and politics that have led to the marginalisation of forest dwellers and unsettled their community life.

As part of my research in Nandurbar, a tribal-dominated district in Maharashtra, I interacted with tribal migrants from the Narmada valley who were in regular conflict with local tribal communities over access and use of forest resources. A common sight—and one that was not unknown to the authorities—was women and men walking over 20 km in the early morning hours with piles of wood on their heads. With the knowledge that 40 per cent of the forest in Nandurbar was degraded due to illegal mining and other development activities, the forest department worried over the rapid depletion of forest cover. There was no dialogue regarding such conflicting interests in the forest.

All these instances illustrated how the colonial model of forest management across tribal areas was losing its legitimacy. There was a governance crisis in the management of forests, given the inability to check indiscriminate illegal extraction of forest resources and quell growing local demands on forest produce. When the FRA first came up for discussion, I was perturbed. How would the Act be received in a situation like this, where there is a near-total breakdown of communication between communities and the local bureaucracies—especially with the outright challenge that many forest areas have thrown up against the Indian state? Forest areas are politically charged and highly sensitive, with large parts under the siege of insurgency (Hebbar, 2018). Forests are now, more than ever before, sites of competition between various interest groups such as environmentalists, tribal forest dwellers, miners, and other commercial and private interests from the tourism and hospitality industry.

Encroachment and Citizenship

The Siddis are spread along India’s western coast across Gujarat, Goa and Karnataka. This tribe of African origin in India is a classic example of a community facing compounded prejudices since the FRA’s implementation. The discussion on the FRA revealed a long history of ‘encroachment’. Historically, the Siddis were brought in as enslaved people to work on plantations and paddy fields and were attached to the local upper-caste landlords and plantation owners. Over time, as they settled in the region, they ‘encroached’ forest land for cultivation. Subsequently, they were granted patta for the land but lost it to members of another caste, who took over their land for cultivation and tried to transfer it in their names during land reforms. Of late, the caste in question filed police complaints against the Siddis, saying that the Siddis were trying to encroach on the land they had purchased from them earlier.

The police have been picking up Siddi men from their homes in the dead of the night on various charges and detaining them for interrogation. The Siddis have now filed an atrocity case against members from the said caste, particularly after they were granted Scheduled Tribe status in 2003. The FRA did provide the Siddis with another context to claim rights over their holdings in the forest. The Siddis are still unclear about the FRA and its provisions. When I visited the Social Welfare Department in Haliyal, Uttara Kannada district, I was promptly dismissed by the only officer available for any inquiry on FRA implementation. For the Siddi activist who accompanied me, my experience only iterated theirs. The issue of not being granted rights on the total land claimed, or even the stipulated 10 acres of land, seemed secondary to the Siddis’ core concern. It was about how the social welfare officer snubbed them, how police officials regularly ridiculed them, and how organisations that supposedly represented their interests continued to decide the direction of their struggle. The concern was regarding the indignity and discrimination in their daily interaction with local government officials, police, employers, and NGOs. The FRA was yet another context that demonstrated their vulnerability and the insurmountable hurdles in their path to a life of dignity. It has not brought about a ‘paradigm shift’ in the lives of the Siddis; it only reiterated their incapacity to navigate existing hierarchies and access the basic provisions of the Act.

What I describe here is not a one-off case but resonates with the experiences of forest dwellers in other parts of India. A case in point is Jagatsinghpur, Odisha, where locals took recourse to the FRA to stop the POSCO Steel Plant from coming up. ⁵ In a personal interview, Dr Urmila Pingle, the Managing Trustee in the Centre for People’s Forestry, Hyderabad, and who was also a member of the Meena Gupta Committee constituted to examine the proposal submitted by POSCO India Pvt Ltd for establishing an Integrated Steel Plant and Captive Port in Jagatsinghpur District, Odisha, brought out the tactics used by government officials to discredit forest dwellers’ claims on forest land. ⁶ She describes how the Odisha government dismissed local forest dwellers’ records, mostly old handwritten parchments, stating that they were fake. The records were old but had George V’s stamp on them, which she argues could not have been faked. The government even went to the extent of declaring that what were being claimed to be forests were, in fact, wastelands. Contrarily to these claims, Pingle found old revenue maps from 1920 showing forests and included this evidence in the final report, which was summarily ignored. Another internal statutory committee, the Forest Advisory Committee, was set up under the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) to verify the report’s findings. She mentioned that gathering information from the Odisha government and the MoEF was an uphill task. The committee members had to write and telephone them repeatedly, requesting files and information.

Given that the government hesitated to provide relevant information to members of a statutory committee, she was doubtful about the government’s intention and whether it would facilitate the FRA process to benefit the forest dwellers. She did not augur much hope about the legislation and its potential to be fair in ascertaining and vesting rights over forestland to the claimants. Regarded as encroachers, the forest dwellers got a raw deal in comparison to the local private landowners with pattas. A rehabilitation plan was drawn out for the latter, whereas the forest dwellers did manage a new package after much protestation but were not assured jobs in the POSCO plant. The crux of the issues raised herein is that the FRA is weak legislation as it fails to hold out against the institutional prejudices that have historically marginalised forest dwellers.

This exposition only raises questions about the inimitability of the FRA. Since the forest dwellers, as described so far, still struggle to convince authorities on the genuineness of their claim, how different is the FRA from similar initiatives in the past to grant pattas? How does the FRA challenge the concept of encroachment that is writ large in the history of forest management concerning tribal forest dwellers? The dictionary definition of ‘encroach’ is to take another’s possessions or rights gradually, stealthily, or advance beyond proper or former limits. An encroacher is an intruder, trespasser, invader, persona non grata, or an unacceptable and unwelcome person, especially a foreign government. In acknowledging the historical wrong in the non-recognition of forest dwellers’ rights on forests, the FRA should, ipso facto, admit that the Indian State was and is the principal encroacher. What does it mean to reverse the historical wrong if such is the case? To begin with, the Act must break the hierarchy built into the processes of ascertaining claims. It must abandon the old vocabulary and processes, favouring a more dialogic approach to its implementation.

Saving Whom? The Inherent Inconsistency Within the FRA

One important limitation of the FRA is the confusion over what this Act saves or rescues. Ostensibly, it is the forest dweller, but what about the forest? The Act does not delve deeper into this issue of how it purports to restore the rights of forest dwellers without engaging with the critical concern of forest conservation. Pingle, in the interview mentioned above, alluded to this issue and argued that the survival of critical ecological zones cannot be ensured without appreciating the role of local forest communities in their conservation. In securing local forest dwellers’ rights, the FRA should appreciate their role and contribution to the conservation of delicate ecologies. For instance, the POSCO plant was proposed in a coastal eco-sensitive zone, prone to cyclones and with a rich reservoir of marine life. The local forest dwellers have developed suitable livelihood strategies that have sustained this critical ecozone over centuries. Pingle mentioned how the locals make a living by depending on seasonal forest produce and cultivating betel vine, which they have been growing in small plots since the 1920s. However, their forest rights claims have been forfeited for a development project that would compromise the ecological health and integrity of the area. Ironically, one of the strongest oppositions to the FRA comes not so much from the forest department but the conservationists and environmentalists. In many southern states, the environmental lobby has been extremely critical of the FRA and has proactively decelerated its implementation. This opposition was particularly palpable in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR), Tamil Nadu, where the presence of tribal forest dwellers is projected as a threat to conservation by environmentalists and the forest department (Hebbar, 2020).

For the forest dweller, the right to forest land is not simply a ‘land question’ or an individual forest dweller’s right over a patch of land, but the right to an everyday relationship with the forest landscape, which embraces a sense of biodiversity and community life. While explaining the two disparate and conflicting approaches to conservation, a social activist in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, elaborated on how the forest department and NGOs, working closely with the forest department, have been compelling local forest dwellers, distributed across 53 villages, to abandon shifting cultivation (podu) and move towards commercial cropping and mono-cropping. They cultivate millets like ragi and jowar and local pulses for consumption and sell some of it in the market. The forest department and NGOs have introduced projects to incentivise forest dwellers through subsidies and loans to grow commercial crops such as biodiesel, teak and eucalyptus in plantations of 150–170 acres. This activist had stated,

They do not understand that plantations are not supposed to be within a forested area. Can we grow trees by pouring water every day inside a forest? Will they survive? They will not. Trees should naturally grow into a forest. Will hybrid plants grow into a forest? The forest department and NGOs do not have sense.

After the initial phase, the incentives were stopped, and many forest dwellers took loans they found difficult to repay. They now often migrate in search of work to earn extra money for repaying their loans. Regular intimidation by the forest department and the police to somehow make them leave the forests has further strained their relations with the forest department. Cases have been filed against forest dwellers for supposedly cutting trees from the Reserved Forests. They were promised houses with electricity and other amenities if they agreed to move out of the forests. At the heart of the conflict are two different approaches to forest conservation. Tribal communities propose a locally nurtured and biodiverse landscape, including humans as its important constituent. In contrast, the forest department and the conservationists have a top-down environmental conservation agenda devoid of the human–nature interface that local communities have historically nurtured and sustained.

The situation in forest areas highlights the need to recognise and acknowledge the complicity of the dominant economic and political class in promoting commercial and environmentally harmful activities in the region. The FRA’s challenge and implementation lie in these powerful dynamics characterising most forest areas. The root cause of the historical injustice against tribal forest dwellers is the commercial development activities responsible for forest degradation. In this respect, government practices severely undermine the publicised spirit of the FRA. Such practices are not just discriminatory toward forest dwellers but also forsake the much-celebrated paradigm shift the FRA conveys in recognising forest dwellers as ‘integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem’ (Pai, 2015, p.1).

Governance in Forest Areas

The articulation of forest dwellers’ rights in the FRA has individualised the claims and diluted the initial discussion of a paradigm shift. Forest dwellers are still perceived as a threat, not as custodians of forest biodiversity. Despite documented evidence of indiscriminate development activities and tourism destroying the Nilgiris, they are blamed for the region’s human–wildlife conflict (Hebbar, 2020). This targeting of tribal forest dwellers reveals government practices dominated by NGOs and the tourism industry—the latter work in collaboration with government departments to promote this perception. The organisations associated with the forest department, such as the JFMCs or VSSs, depend on NGOs for much of the field-related activities such as disseminating information and organising meetings about programmes, projects, surveying villages, and collating and evaluating FRA claims. In Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, not only was the claimed amount of acreage for community rights significantly brought down, from 2,500 acres to 28 acres in one case, it did not include common land for livestock grazing, roads, sacred groves, and medicinal plants and minor forest produce. This mismatch between the demand and what was approved was because of the VSS’s role in ascertaining the boundaries for community rights. The VSS would delimit the boundaries to their area of influence and control. One tribal activist’s statement that ‘The land owned by VSS was part of what the people had given to the VSS. It is being returned to the community as a favour through community rights’ brings out the irony of what is being doled out in the name of community rights and the charade behind the good intentions of FRA provisions and implementation.

Tribal forest dwellers in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, and Adilabad, Telangana, have been vocal about being discriminated against in the process of ascertaining claims. Forests are sites of competition between interest groups, and the FRA has not equipped forest dwellers to contend with them unequivocally. The FRA is misused to delegitimise community rights and a sense of community among forest dwellers. Community rights are not just about claims over a patch of forestland by a community but an expression of a sense of territoriality, identity, culture and belongingness. The VSS’s contesting claims undermine this idea of community rights and reproduce the ‘historical injustice’ denounced in the FRA.

Governance in tribal areas is now characterised by ‘pillarisation’, a pattern ‘under which state resources are used to finance services delivered by private institutions’ (Salamon, 2002, p. 6). National and international NGOs represent the ‘new tools of public action’, or third-party actors who perform ‘basic government function: the exercise of discretion over the use of public authority and the spending of public funds’ (Salamon, 2002, p. 2). NGOs are integral to the third-party government introduced in tribal areas, where ‘power is splintered among numerous divergent groups and…no single actor, including the state, can enforce its will’ (Salamon, 2002, p. 13). Evidently, in present-day governance in tribal areas, the state is both a stakeholder and the broker between competing interest-groups. While giving the impression of democratisation in tribal areas, in actual practice, this form of governance does not hold anyone responsible for inaction or the lack of political will. The state has abandoned its distributive role for a more managerial one that seeks to arbitrate and coordinate transactions between pluralities of agents. Salamon (2002, p. 13) terms this interrelationship between various actors as ‘asymmetric interdependencies’, wherein all are ‘dependent on each other but rarely in a fully symmetrical way’. The plurality of actors and competing interests have made governance in forest areas more complex and contentious. This emerges as one of the formidable challenges in the FRA’s implementation. It conceals the collusion of interest of government departments, NGOs, industries, and the local power brokers in arresting the Act’s implementation. The long-drawn-out and ongoing conflict between Gram Sabhas, local forest dwellers, and government departments—with different government departments serving interest groups such as environmentalists, commercial interests, and tribal communities—expose the ground-level complexities informing the FRA’s implementation (Hebbar, 2020).

The FRA’s implementation depends heavily on the efficacy of the network between various institutions and the tribal and forest communities. In this association of self-governing networks, the state emerges as a dismembered category. It reveals the fissures within and between its various units over the Act’s implementation. For example, one issue that has come up regularly is the forest department’s resistance to implementing the Act. The dominance of the forest department in the forest rights committees and the weak presence of tribal welfare departments in many states, particularly in south India, have significantly slowed the implementation of the Act. This neglect is not surprising, given that the forest department has been on an eviction spree since 1996 to reclaim forestland from tribal and other forest dwellers (Thayyil, 2009). For tribes, this conflict of purpose between the different government departments only exposes the absence of collective responsibility on the part of the state to ensure the Act’s implementation. The Forest Rights Act, which is supposed to check these discrepancies and protect forest dwellers, has given forest and revenue officials a prominent role in determining claims.

Take, for instance, the process of recognising the rights of forest dwellers. Any person claiming forest rights would have to fulfil the criteria laid down in the Act by furnishing ‘acceptable’ evidence. The Act proposes the formation of Gram Sabhas or village-level institutions for making recommendations of claims to the screening committee at the sub-divisional, district, and state levels to verify the claims’ authenticity. The higher-level committees comprise officials from the revenue, tribal affairs, and forest departments; three Panchayati Raj institution members from the corresponding level; two from the Scheduled Tribes; and one woman. ⁷ This inclusion of government officials in the committees reintroduces the same power structure the Act sought to remedy. Field interviews revealed cases of violence against and intimidation of tribal forest dwellers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and aggravating tensions between local officials and tribes. They also illustrated how the local government officials have disrupted protocol and undermined the Gram Sabhas.

Concluding Thoughts and Suggestions on the FRA

In this article, I have discussed key concerns regarding the FRA and its implementation—the lack of attention and care towards forest dwellers and their diverse contexts and the refusal to recognise them as consociates in redressing historical injustice. I have highlighted issues specific to regions and those that cut across different parts of the country. There is a need to deliberate on both while identifying the challenges in implementing the FRA. This admission includes accepting the dynamic nature of the term community or village assembly, examining the status and role of Gram Sabhas critically, comprehending the constraints they work under, and documenting the reasons for delayed or rejected claims.

The term ‘encroachers’ in the Act is an oxymoron. The routine use of the term ‘encroachers’ to refer to forest dwellers sets a negative precedent. Its disavowal in the FRA loses meaning when it is not followed up in the procedural practices of the government (Pai, 2015, p. 1). The continued use of the term only exposes the disregard and apathy of concerned authorities and departments toward communities living in forest areas and the FRA. It only reiterates that the FRA has sharpened the conflict of interest between local bureaucracies and forest dwellers. The term ‘encroachers’ reeks of a colonial, top-down institutional set-up that needs to be phased out and replaced by a more interactive, accommodative system of ascertaining claims. However, any such initiative requires a critical introspection of the governance model in forest areas and how institutional practices in these areas violate the core of what the Act promises to forest dwellers. Governance in forest areas reveals various competing interests that undermine the FRA. Environmental groups, in particular, have been resisting the implementation of the FRA with the tacit or open support of forest officials. There is a need to identify such challenges posed to the implementation of the Act and question the politics unfolding in forest areas in the name of conservation.

There is a lack of clarity on the intention and politics of the FRA. Suppose the FRA is only about restoring forestland to tribes. In that case, there is a need to tone down the public opinion that projects the Act as a legislation with radical possibilities. However, what if the larger vision is of redressing the antagonism built over a century against forest dwellers? Recognising and remedying the colonial attitude and ideas that dominate institutional processes and practices concerning forest dwellers becomes an indispensable feature of the FRA. The FRA has primarily focussed on past deeds and not on how that history of marginalisation adversely impacts forest dwellers’ present-day lives. It has also failed to demonstrate a vision for the future of governance in forest areas or forest dwellers. There has been no reflection on reforming institutional processes and practices that continue to alienate them in the present. Circumventing or challenging the configuration of interests that now dominate forest areas could serve as a beginning in this direction.