Why a letter by Chhattisgarh's forest department ignited protests

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2 days ago

In 2020, when forest communities living near Chhattisgarh's Achanakmar Tiger Reserve laid claim to their legal right to conserve and manage the forest, they faced an unexpected roadblock. The district authorities asked them to get a no-objection certificate from the forest department.
Activists pointed out that this defied logic – the Forest Rights Act, 2006, under which the communities had filed the claim, had been enacted to rectify historical injustices to forest-dwelling communities, many perpetrated by forest administrators in the name of conservation. It sought to restore the traditional rights of forest-dwelling communities, which effectively amounted to a curtailing of the powers of the forest department.
Recounting the episode, an activist from the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve Sangharsh Samiti said the communities had to resort to a lengthy process to advocate for their rights, holding several meetings with officials of the forest department, the tribal welfare department, and even the chief minister. 'It took us four years to finally get the rights,' said the activist, who requested anonymity.
A recent letter sparked fears that those hard-won rights stood threatened again. In May, the Chhattisgarh forest department issued a letter that effectively amounted to giving itself overarching powers to manage forests where communities' rights under the Forest Rights Act had already been recognised.
The letter, dated May 15, cited an older 2020 letter, which stated that the forest department would be the nodal agency for any work pertaining to such forests. Although the 2020 letter was withdrawn after a wave of protests, the new letter ignored that withdrawal, and cited its order as one that was in force.
The letter stated that these forests would be managed through working plans prepared by the forest department – these plans follow an approach that takes into account details of tree cover and ecosystems, and estimates of how much carbon was stored in the forest.
Experts argued that under the Forest Rights Act, this process should not be controlled by the forest department. 'This is completely violative of the letter and spirit of the act,' said Sharadchandra Lele, a distinguished fellow with Bengaluru-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. Lele has served on an expert committee that looked at how the Forest Rights Act was faring in Chhattisgarh.
He explained that according to rules formulated by the ministry of tribal affairs, once a community's rights are recognised under the law, the community itself is to form a committee to draw up a conservation plan, based on which it will manage and protect the wildlife and biodiversity of the forest.
'Gram sabha is a statutory body and fully empowered to take on this responsibility under the act,' he said. 'The forest department is neither the nodal agency, nor does it have the power under the act to stop the community's management plan.'
In June, Chhattisgarh's forest department issued a clarificatory note of a single line, stating that rather than serve as the nodal agency, the department would 'play a coordinating role for the verification of community forest resource rights'.
But this did not quell the disquiet – on July 1 and July 2, gram sabhas across several districts in Chhattisgarh, including Kanker, Surguja and Bastar, participated in protests, demanding a withdrawal of the May letter.
Late evening on July 3, the forest department withdrew the letter. But experts noted with concern that while issuing the withdrawal, the forest department stated that it was awaiting model community forest management plans based on working plans from the tribal and forest ministries.
Lele said the department's 'repeated invocation' of such plans 'reveals that it still wants to impose highly technical and irrelevant formats on communities'.
Scroll emailed the state's forest department, seeking responses to criticisms over the recent letter – this story will be updated if it responds.
Supporting role
At the central level, the Union tribal affairs ministry, and not the forest ministry, is the nodal agency for the implementation of the Forest Rights Act. Experts pointed out that this was in effect an acknowledgement that the interests of forest administrators and communities are often at odds.
'The act envisioned to have either a neutral body as the nodal agency, or at least a body that would favour the welfare of the forest communities,' said a development practitioner who has previously worked on the implementation of forest rights in the state.
Under the act, the forest department was only given a supporting role – it was responsible for physically verifying the extent of forest land in sites under consideration, providing maps and documents to communities that would help them compile evidence in support of their claims, updating forest maps when rights were vested with communities, and training gram sabhas in the implementation of the act and forest management.
In some ways, Chhattisgarh's apparent attempts to grant greater powers to the forest department are in contrast with its record – it is India's leading state when it comes to recognising forest rights. As of March, the state had recognised 52,000 claims by communities to access and use forest produce. Further, of these, more than 4,000 claims to manage these forests had been legally recognised, the recent letter notes.
But experts said, as in many states, in Chhattisgarh too, the forest department had often failed to perform even its supporting role adequately – for instance, in many instances, it had not provided forest records to gram sabhas, and not imparted training to them.
'Communities do need support from the forest department to prevent poaching or illegal tree felling,' said Anubhav Shori of the Chhattisgarh Van Adhikar Manch. 'But the forest department does not want it to be an actual partnership, and instead wants full control.'
Forest departments' interference
Forest departments in several states have had a long history of interfering in the Forest Rights Act process.
In 2010, two years after the act began to be implemented, a committee headed by NC Saxena, a former secretary of the Planning Commission, published a report after examining the role of the departments across states. It found that in some states, such as Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh, it was playing a 'much greater role' than intended under the act, and inserting 'various conditions and screening processes that are not required or even permitted under the Act.'
This included, in some instances, asking forest guards to take up Forest Rights Act work instead of the tribal welfare department, or allowing forest department officials to veto decisions of district level committees.
Lele, who was also a member of this committee, said they had recommended that the forest department only provide 'support' and 'not engage in hands-on management' in areas where communities' rights over forests had been recognised.
He added, 'But since this committee report, there has been no clarification or implementation of the recommendations. That is why the forest department is constantly trying to reassert its power that it has lost when communities get rights over forest resources.'
'Scientific' management plans
By asserting that community forests would be managed by the forest department's plans, Shori argued, the May letter appeared like an attempt to impose a 'unilateral directive' and 'curtail community participation in forest management'.
Such a move would be particularly unjust given that 'an estimated 8,000 more villages are still awaiting similar recognition' of their community rights, he noted.
Activists were also worried about the recent letter's mention of drawing up plans for the 'scientific management' of forests. Given that the letter seemed to seek to limit the rights of communities to manage their forests, they argued that such an assertion implied that their traditional strategies were flawed.
'When forest fires occur in these forests, the forest department works with the communities to douse it,' said the activist from the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve Sangharsh Samiti. 'Forest officials alone are not enough to patrol these large extents of forests. They take our help through joint forest management committees. So now how is it that suddenly traditional knowledge is not scientific?'