JOIN USLaw of the jungle
Among the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were to be achieved by 2015 in response to the world’s main development challenges, the seventh goal was to ensure environmental sustainability. The Sustainable Development Goals have come up since 2015 to accelerate the progress achieved under the MDGs and to address other important development issues. According to one factsheet released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI), by the end of 2015, India’s objective to integrate the principle of sustainable development into the country’s policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources was still a “work in progress”.
As it stands today, millions of forest dwellers are on the verge of being forcibly evicted as the Supreme Court has ordered the states of India to throw them out after July 10 if their claims under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) are rejected. It will be instructive to train one’s gaze on the fate of such populations in just five states — Madhya Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra — accounting for more than 50% of the total forested area of India.
Whether the putative rejections can justify forced evictions is already a bone of contention as many argue that no communities can be legally evicted without their free and informed consent even from the “critical wildlife habitats” and surely not from other areas. That the tribals, constituting less than 9% of India’s total population, are at the forefront of the army of ‘martyrs’ to India’s development saga is evident from the fact that they constitute about 40% of those evicted for ‘development’. Apart from granting environmental and forest clearances regardless of the rights of local tribal communities, the government has exposed our mineral resources to corporate depredation.
India has the largest number of poor in the world, many of whom depend directly or indirectly on forests for a living. Poverty, as well as large and expanding human and livestock populations, puts unrelenting pressure on the forests, the outcome of which is their severe degradation. About two-thirds of the total forest cover is in the tribal districts, and the incidence of poverty among the tribal people is more than 50%.
Alongside this reality, the empirical observation is that biodiverse forests have survived better where communities live in close communion with the forests with their customary practices than where a state has displaced the communities, affecting the biodiversity they sustain as their livelihood source. With the assault inflicted by the loss of the proportion of land area covered by forest, the impending threat of forced evictions of the forest dwellers is sure to fritter away the spirit of the SDGs.
The Indian Forest Act empowered state governments to divert forest land to other uses. Between 1951 and 1980, millions of hectares of forest land were thus diverted. The Forest Policy of 1952, which recommended that 33% of the area of the country be brought under forest cover, was hardly observed. As a result, we had only 21.34% of the land under forest cover at the end of 2015.
Unfettered immunity
Today, the Union government’s proposed amendments to the Forest Act would provide unfettered immunity to forest officials and summarily do away with the presumption of innocence. Eviction of tribals from their sustainable use of forest land, along with wide, corruptive powers given to forest officials, is sure to firm up the impression that the government seeks to reap benefits from evicting communities and destroying natural forests in the interests of business.
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, popularly known as the Forests Rights Act (FRA), was enacted in 2007 through the Ministry of Tribal Affairs to correct the “historic injustice done to forest-dwelling communities.” These communities were cultivating/occupying forest land and using forest produce since ages but had no tenurial security.
But upon review, it has been found that the implementation of the FRA has been poor, and therefore its potential to achieve livelihood security and changes in forest governance along with strengthening of conservation, has hardly been achieved. Twelve years down the line, corporate goons have aligned with the police and the forest department officials to stand in the way of recognition of the claims of Adivasis to the forest land. What is worse, whenever there is a popular uprising, the protesters have been subjected to unspeakable torture and repression.
As per data released by Global Forest Watch, an arm of the World Resources Institute (WRI), a US-based NGO, India lost 1,22,748 hectares of forest between 2014 and 2018, corresponding to the Narendra Modi government’s first term, 77,963 hectares between 2009 and 2013, the UPA-2 years and 87,350 hectares between 2004 and 2008 under UPA-1. It contradicts the claim that in the last two years forest and tree cover has increased by 1% in India. The point is not to make one political dispensation look more predatory than the other but to drive home the fact that our tall claims of being an environmentally-responsible country is without substance.
Since 2014, the Modi government had been attempting to dilute the provisions of many environmental laws. Consider a bill called the Indian Forest Act, 2019, a draft of which has been sent to state governments for comments. It is a tentative prequel to a legislation that seeks to bypass the people at the altar of big business and commercial greed, besides some of its clauses being undemocratic.
The rights of local communities are an integral part of any sustainable and just model of conservation, as is now recognised in international law. The new government must salvage the spirit of the National Forest Policy (NFP) of 1988, which acknowledged for the first time the role forest-dwelling communities play in sustainable forest management.