Projects will need approval of tribals, forest-dwellers

Soon, government clearance will not be enough to start an industrial or development projects in the forests. It will be mandatory to get the approval of the tribals who live in these forests.

Updated on: Jul 8, 2009, 24:48:45 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Soon, government clearance will not be enough to start an industrial or development projects in the forests. It will be mandatory to get the approval of the tribals who live in these forests.

Even projects that don't involve people being displaced but are close to a dwelling cluster, the permission will be a pre-requisite.

A notification to this effect — with the aim of protecting the land rights of tribals and forest dwellers like any other Indian citizen — will be issued by the end of this week, a senior official of the Environment and Forests Ministry, who was not willing to be quoted, said.

Projects like the construction of road, coalmines or steel factories are allowed mostly in degraded forests — which constitute over 60 per cent of forests in India. For any project, approval of the Forest Appraisal Committee of the Ministry of Environment and Forest is a must. But prior approval of the people on whose land the project is to be set up was not a condition.

“On official records, the land was not owned by tribals or forest-dwellers. It was government land and therefore, their approval was not required,” an environment ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

There is a practice of holding public hearing at project sites — a requirement for forest clearance — but Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh recently admitted these were mostly “fixed”.

Things have changed to a great extent since the new law — the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest-Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, also known as the Forest Rigths Act — came into force from January 1, 2008.

It provides for registration of land in possession of tribals and forest dwellers for three generations in their names and gives rights over minor forest produce. Before it came into force, 83 per cent tribals in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh had no legal rights over the land they owned for generations and the forest produce.

Since the implementation of the law, over 60 per cent land claims of tribals in the two states and Orissa have been settled. “Land has been registered in their names,” said Shankar (who only uses his first name) of Campaign for Survival and Dignity, a body representing tribals.

“Diversion of forestland without respecting people’s right is illegal and in violation of the government’s commitment to forest-dwellers,” Shankar said.

Ramesh agreed. “It is an issue and we are moving in that direction,” he told HT.

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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