Nearly a third of land-related conflicts are in parliamentary constituencies where the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) is an “important” election issue, says an analysis by Land Conflict Watch, a comprehensive database of land-related conflicts in India.
Out of the 781 conflicts in the database, 264 conflicts were mapped to constituencies where FRA is a key issue. Notably, 117 land conflicts were found to directly affect forest dwelling communities and involve nearly 2.1 lakh hectares of land as well as 6.1 lakh people, the analysis released on April 12 noted.
Nearly 44% of the 117 conflicts were triggered due to conservation and forestry projects, such as plantations, and involved forest administration. “This suggests that the main adversarial party in such conflicts is the Forest department,” said Anmol Gupta, one of the authors of the report.
