Continuing with its business-friendly regulatory changes, the Narendra Modi government has brought in a key change diminishing the applicability of watershed Forest Rights Act (FRA) for seeking statutory forest clearance for projects.
Continuing with its business-friendly regulatory changes, the Narendra Modi government has brought in a key change diminishing the applicability of watershed Forest Rights Act (FRA) for seeking statutory forest clearance for projects.
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The environment ministry has exempted plantations, notified as forests within 75 years of the FRA coming into force on 13 December 2005 — and not having tribal population as per 2001 and 2011 census — from the environment ministry’s 2009 circular that made implementation of the act mandatory for green approval of the projects.
It would mean that the FRA provision will not apply to a large chunk of forest areas such as the one which the Odisha government acquired despite resistance from locals for India’s biggest foreign direct investment project — the Posco Steel Plant in Jagatsinghpur.
The move would ease approval process for projects coming up near green areas not recorded as forests by the British and not having tribal population since 2001. However, it fails to recognise rights of other forest dwellers.
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The change notified by the ministry through a circular on Tuesday gives powers to the district collectors to notify whether FRA is applicable to the project site or not. And they will have to certify that the green area was not a notified forest in 1930 and that no tribals live in thhe villages as per the last two census.
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The change notified by the ministry through a circular on Tuesday gives powers to the district collectors to notify whether FRA is applicable to the project site or not. And they will have to certify that the green area was not a notified forest in 1930 and that no tribals live in thhe villages as per the last two census.
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That would be enough for the ministry’s forest advisory committee (FAC) to exempt FRA compliance for the project, government officials said. It’s another benefit would be that the mandatory consent of the body of villagers in and around the project site called gram sabha will not be required.
The ministry said the FRA does not apply for forest dwellers not been living in forests for more than 75 years since the applicability of the law. “Since villages will not have any person belonging to both the categories scheduled tribes and forest dwellers…question of recognition of their rights does not arise,” the ministry’s circular said.
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.
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