Two Decades of the Forest Rights Act and Ongoing Protests Highlight India's Conservation Challenges

In the 1890s, a Soliga Adivasi in the Biligiri Rangana Hills of southern Karnataka would have found their world legally reduced to a hut, a burial ground, a path to a shrine, and the right to draw water. The Madras Forest Department’s notification of “Reserved Forest” under the 1878 Indian Forest Act recorded these concessions and little else. Cultivation, hunting, gathering honey or amla, collecting firewood, and grazing cattle were criminalised overnight, turning ancestral stewards into “encroachers” on land they had inhabited for millennia. This “settlement of rights,” carried out under colonial law across much of the subcontinent, is the “historic injustice” the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006—known as the FRA—was enacted to correct (The Hindu).

Two decades after its passage, the legislation’s promise remains largely unrealised. The FRA recognised that the Indian Forest Act was a British instrument designed to convert ecosystems into revenue-yielding timber resources, replacing diverse forests with single-species plantations and creating exploitative “Forest Villages” for labour. Independent India retained the 1927 Act, its ownership structure, and a forest department vested with police powers and a revenue orientation. When zamindari forests were nationalised or princely game reserves converted, the approach remained “take control first… and worry later about who lives there” (The Hindu).

The gap between statute and practice is visible in the mechanics of claiming Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights. In Kawapal village, deep in the forests of south-east Bastar in Chhattisgarh, residents rose before dawn to walk 28 kilometres through dense forest and streams, mapping 3,833 hectares of customary territory using a mobile GPS application. The exercise, facilitated by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, was a single step in a gruelling bottom-up process that the law envisions as simple. In theory, a Gram Sabha’s two-page application suffices; in reality, communities must navigate bureaucratic hoops to prove rights over forests they have always managed (The Hindu).

Government data claims 1,24,161 community rights titles recognised over 74,019 square kilometres. But the aggregate figure masks a critical distortion. Chhattisgarh reports 52,000 CFR titles and Madhya Pradesh nearly 28,000. Scrutiny reveals these are often multiple titles for discrete uses—grazing, firewood, minor forest produce—within the same patch, or rights over tiny non-forest parcels like shrines and playgrounds. Effectively, only about 4,300 villages in Chhattisgarh and a mere four in Madhya Pradesh have secured genuine CFR rights over customary forests. The numbers have been propped up to divert attention from the non-recognition of the substantive right to manage entire forest landscapes (The Hindu).

The crisis of implementation extends to the Northeast, where the FRA’s relevance is officially contested. Arunachal Pradesh has 80 per cent forest cover, and Scheduled Tribes constitute two-thirds of its population. Every cultural, material, and commercial activity is forest-linked. Since 2012, the state government has argued the FRA is “not so relevant” because customary community ownership prevails. Colonial state takeover was limited here by terrain and tribal resistance, leaving communities with autonomous control over unclassed forests. Yet nearly 45 per cent of the state’s area is now state-controlled forest, the highest in the region, expanded at the expense of those unclassed community lands. Unlike Nagaland or Mizoram, Arunachal lacks special constitutional exemption from the FRA (The Hindu).

The stakes are rising. More than two-thirds of all forest land diverted in Arunachal since 2008 were approved after 2019. Recent amendments to the Forest Conservation Act have further eased scrutiny for projects in border states. The FRA appears in official paperwork only when community consent is required for diversion, without the law being implemented or rights recognised. A widespread misconception that the FRA caps all claims at four hectares—ill-suited to a landscape where households customarily hold entire hills for shifting cultivation—dampens demand. In fact, that ceiling applies only to individual claims; community rights over customary forests are bounded by traditional limits alone. Section 3(1)(j), unused anywhere in the country, explicitly includes rights recognised under state or customary tribal law, a provision critical for Arunachal where the Jhum Land Regulation, 1947, recognises village and clan rights over shifting cultivation land (The Hindu).

As the FRA enters its third decade, the legislation stands as “among the most enlightened pieces of legislation that independent India has enacted,” yet its execution remains “patchy, reluctant, and ill-informed.” The assault has broadened beyond land to ways of life, languages, and cultures. The question framed by the lawmakers and administrators have deferred for twenty years—whether the state can coexist with forest communities as equal partners in governance—remains unanswered.