In a shock to the Adivasis, tribals, and forest dwellers of India, along with people who have been working for the implementation of the Forest Rights Act 2006, the Supreme Court has ordered the forced eviction of more than 1,000,000 tribal and other forest-dwelling households from forestlands across 16 states of the country.
According to this article by Nitin Sethi, this was done after the government failed to defend a law protecting their rights. The final country-wide numbers of forced evictions are likely to rise substantially as other states are forced to comply with the court orders. The orders came in a case filed by wildlife groups questioning the validity of the Forest Rights Act. The petitioners had also demanded that all those whose claims over traditional forestlands are rejected under the law should be evicted by state governments as a consequence.
The Union government failed to present its lawyers in defence of the law on February 13, leading a three-judge bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Navin Sinha and Indira Banerjee to pass orders giving states till July 27 to evict tribals whose claims had been rejected and submit a report on it to the Supreme Court. The written order was released on February 20.
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA) legally recognises the rights of Adivasi, tribal, and forest-dwelling communities to live in and from their forests and to protect and manage their lands. The Act was created to reverse the erosion of their traditional rights by forestry policies, encroachment on their lands by outsiders and the take-over of their forests.
This ruling however, has undermined and worked against all the efforts that have gone towards the effective implementation of the Act. This will potentially leave the forests of India vulnerable to land-grabbing by corporates and industries.
“The last time country-wide evictions took place was in 2002-2004, again triggered by a Supreme Court order, which led to many cases of violence, deaths and protests in the central Indian tribal forested areas and uprooting of around 300,000 households, notes researcher C. R. Bijoy in his published research”, writes Nitin Sethi.
While it was a wildlife conservation NGO Wildlife First, along with NCS and TRACT that filed the petition to that seeks to have the Forest Rights Act declared unconstitutional, several conservation NGOs, movements for democratic forest control and experts in conservation biology are against this application and the petition itself. Here is the joint letter they wrote against the application and petition:
“We are shocked that you would file a petition like this at a time when the Central government is seeking to accelerate clearances and industry is piling on pressure to make forest, biodiversity and resource destruction easier. You would surely be aware that across the country a significant force that has stopped this resource loot is local communities fighting to protect their natural resources and habitats, often by using the FRA. Your petition seeks to gravely undermine one of their primary weapons.
We understand that you have concerns regarding the implementation of the FRA, but these can be debated separately. An expensive, long and dangerous court battle – fraught with the risk of being hijacked by government bureaucracies and corporate front groups – is not the way to address them. This would put at risk many community and other conservation initiatives that have existed and have been strengthened by the FRA. Indeed, there are many examples from the states where FRA has been effectively used by local communities/gram sabhas to strengthen protection and management of forests, as in the case of Niyamgiri, Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, and protected areas such as the BRT Hills. The prospects for conservation under FRA need to be appreciated by conservation groups and organizations.”
It remains to be seen how NGOs who disagree with the verdict will challenge this decision. One thing is for certain that in the lead up to the Lok Sabha elections, the voices of millions of Adivasis and traditional forest dwellers is bound to be loud.