NAC fixes roles of green, tribal ministries on FRA

Sonia Gandhi headed National Advisory Council has recommended sweeping changes in Forest Rights Act rules to ensure that the law is implemented in right earnest and said policy directive on wildlife habitats is not the domain of the environment ministry.

Updated on: Mar 16, 2011, 24:43:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Sonia Gandhi headed National Advisory Council has recommended sweeping changes in Forest Rights Act rules to ensure that the law is implemented in right earnest and said policy directive on wildlife habitats is not the domain of the environment ministry.

“The Environment ministry is responsible only for administrative task of determining wildlife habitats; framing of policy and procedure is the responsibility of the Tribal Affairs ministry,” the NAC said in a communication to the government on Tuesday.

It is for first time, such a differentiation between roles of Tribal Affairs and Environment ministry in implementing the Forest Rights Act of 2006 has been stated. The environment ministry had notified rules for identification of critical wildlife habitats, which it had to withdraw following protest from forest right activists.

The changes include more access to minor forest produce, right of tribal to decide whose rights should be recognized, field evidence to claim right instead of documentary evidence and allowing gram sabhas to identify the forest areas for identification of community rights.

The NAC sent its recommendations to Tribal Affairs ministry and asked it to modify rules to ensure that rights of tribals, who are among the poorest in India, are “properly” recognized. A joint committee of tribal affairs and environment ministry also had made similar recommendations but the government is yet to fully act on it.

The NAC has attempted to undo many wrongs in the existing rules by asking that atleast two-third members of the forest right committees at the gram sabha level should be scheduled tribes. The earlier condition was half, which the NAC found had resulted in non-forest dwellers dominating the meetings, which meant that genuine tribals voice remained unheard.

The council has also recommended scrapping of a clause in the existing rules that allowed only primitive ways of carrying away minor forest produce such as carrying them on head or handcarts or a bicycle.

Instead, it wants that forest dwellers or their cooperative society should be allowed to transport forest produce through locally appropriate for sale to sustain themselves and their families. Even value addition to minor forest produce, which is said to be business of over Rs 5,000 crore per year, has also been recommended.

The NAC has also said that no forest dweller can be evicted, including those in wildlife areas, without identification of their rights and had asked state government to record all forest diversion till July 2009 and put it in public domain. In July 2009, the environment ministry had issued an order saying no forest dweller can be evicted without their consent.

The NAC also said that deadline to file claims were not as per Forest Rights Act and needs to be lifted. It had asked the government to prescribe a minimum support price for all minor forest produce such as bamboo and tendu leaves and asked Environment ministry to review its policy regarding bamboo. The ministry is working on new policy for bamboo.

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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