1. BACKGROUND
In India, the Scheduled Tribes (STs) and other traditional forest dwellers (OTFDs) have been inhabiting and using forests for generations. During the consolidation of State forests in the colonial period and in independent India, their forest rights on ancestral lands were not adequately recognized. To undo this historical injustice, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act (also known as Forest Rights Act or FRA), was enacted in 2006. The FRA mainly recognizes two types of rights: 1) Individual Forest Rights1 and 2) Community forest rights. The focus of this study is on community forest rights.
The community forest rights i.e. the Community Rights (CR) and Community Forest Resource rights (CFRR) provisions of the FRA, when taken together, have the potential to decentralize and deepen democratic forest governance and bring about a transformative change in the economic and social conditions of the local people, and improve the management of the forests. They can further ensure livelihood security, poverty alleviation and development for the STs and OTFDs. This has been illustrated through its implementation in other states such as Maharashtra and Odisha (Sahu, Paul, and Dethe 2019; Sarangi 2020). FRA also gives high importance to gender equity and creates space for the inclusion of women in forest governance.
The challenge, however, has been getting these rights recognized. In particular, Chhattisgarh is one of the central Indian states where one would expect extensive CFRR recognition. It is home to 78 lakh Adivasis, which constitute 31% of the state population; of these more than 90% are rural. Moreover ~66% of the rural population is below poverty line. Chhattisgarh is also a heavily forested state where the Recorded Forest Area (RFA) in the State is ~ 45% of the state’s geographical area and about 50% of the villages in the State are located inside five kilometres radius of forests (“India State of Forest Report 2019” 2019). Thus for inhabitants of these villages, which mainly include STs and OTFDs, forests are the primary source of livelihood. Unfortunately, the overall implementation of
community forest rights provisions is quite poor (“National Research Study on Implementation of Forest Rights Act in Neighboring States of Odisha” 2013).