Ministry U-turn: No relocation without consent

Four days after the Environment ministry’s bid to undercut the Forest Rights Act, minister Jairam Ramesh has intervened and said no forest dwellers will be relocated without “consent of gram sabhas and the affected persons”. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 15, 2011, 24:04:59 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Four days after the Environment ministry’s bid to undercut the Forest Rights Act, minister Jairam Ramesh has intervened and said no forest dwellers will be relocated without “consent of gram sabhas and the affected persons”.

In response to an HT report on February 12 saying the guidelines violate the Forest Rights Act (FRA), Ramesh, in a six page note, reiterated his point saying that extensive consultations with sabha and the affected persons will have to be undertaken for notification of Critical Wildlife Habitats (CWH), but with a big change.

“The extensive consultation will mean consent,” he said. The Campaign for Survival and Dignity (CSD), a group representing tribals, welcomed the minister’s note but said his statement is not reflected in the guidelines.

“Simply because the note says otherwise will not change the way guidelines will be implemented. The guideline nowhere says that notification will occur only after consultation / consent of the gram sabha,” said Shankar Gopalakrishnan of CSD.

The minister also said the guidelines ensure that the habitats are declared with the voluntary consent of the affected people, to give the state governments ample scope to explore the possibility of co-existence of wildlife and humans.

“If such a possibility is not practicable, the expert committee -- which also includes the district tribal welfare officer and a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) working in the field of tribal affairs -- will hold consultations with the gram sabha for voluntary relocation,” the minister said.

CSD said the words "co-existence" do not appear in the guidelines anywhere (except in the quote of the section itself). “There is only a vague statement that the requirements of the law should be met,” Gopalakrishnan said.

While the minister said critical wildlife habitats will be identified on a case to case basis following scientific and objective criteria and after settling the rights of tribals, it does not find mention in the guidelines.

The minister said that his ministry will ensure that the FRA is “respected” in implementation of wildlife conservation programmes and if any violation is reported, with full documentation, it will ensure that the situation is rectified.

But, the ministry’s own committee headed by former bureaucrat N C Saxena had found that relocation in critical tiger habitats was continuing without recognizing their rights or any scientific studies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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