Seventeen years ago, the Parliament enacted the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act – a.k.a. Forest Rights Act (FRA) – 2006. FRA was designed “to address the long-standing insecurity of tenurial and access rights of forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers including those who were forced to relocate their dwelling due to State development interventions”.
It recognised the fact that “forest rights on ancestral lands and their habitat were not adequately recognised in the consolidation of State forests during the colonial period as well as in independent India resulting in historical injustice to the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem”.
FRA is the first such law enacted anywhere in the world. Hailed as a beacon for forest conservation by conservationists and forest-dwellers alike, FRA was to finally usher in forest dwellers’ conservation-centred democratic forest governance. It prescribes a transparent procedure to record and issue titles to pre-existing rights that the Act recognised and vested on forest dwellers in 2006.
