Tribal bill GOM approval

The ministry of Environment and Forests has decided to remain silent on National Forest Commission?s comments on Scheduled Tribes, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 23, 2006, 23:18:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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For a strange reason, the ministry of Environment and Forests has decided to remain silent on National Forest Commission’s comments on Scheduled Tribes (Recognisation of Forest Rights) Bill.

The commission had said that the Tribal Bill would be harmful to the interests of forests and ecological security of the country. It also said forest encroachments to the extent of 3.60 lakh acres per annum have already been settled. If any settlement are still remaining, the State governments can appoint commissions, headed by a judge, to look into the claims and it should not be left to he gram sabha as stated in the Bill.

In its comments on the commission’s recommendations submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office, the ministry has decided to maintain silence on recommendations 340-345 on the tribal rights. “It is a matter being looked after by another government ministry,” an official explained.

The ministry’s neutral stand apparently helped the Group of Ministers headed by Foreign Minister Pranab Mukerjee to end stalemate on the recommendations of the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s report on the Tribal Bill. “The GoM has agreed to whatever dilution the Tribal Affairs ministry had suggested in the JPC report,” said an environment ministry official.

JPC had recommended that rights of all forest dwellers, irrespective of tribal or not, should be recognised. It had asked that the cut-off date for recognising right should be December 2005 and not October 1980 as stated in the original bill. The third major recommendation was that gram sabha would recognise the rights of the dwellers.

But, the government has not agreed with JPC recommendations in totality. The GoM believed to have recommended that rights of only tribals would be recognised and the cut-off date could not be December 2005.

However, the GoM gave a major relief to forest dwellers stating that they would get financial compensation for relocation, apart from getting land for the forest land taken over by the state government. The GoM has also suggested that approach of consultation before rehabilitation should be adopted.

The Tribal Affairs ministry is now drafting a new Tribal Bill based on GoM recommendations for bringing it before the Cabinet soon. The legislation is likely to be introduced in the winter session of Parliament.

That may not be without stiff opposition from the Left Parties and conservationalists. Brinda Karat, polit bureau member of CPIM, has been demanding that the JPC report should be accepted in totality. “There is no scope for dilution,” she recently said.

PK Sen, former director of Project Tiger, accused the politicians of trying to grab forest land through tribals. “I am sure that the Tribal Rights law will result in devastation of forests as politicians will take benefit of their claim to own forest land,” he said.

Vandana Shiva of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, however, tried to take the middle path. “The government should try to strike a balance between tribal rights and projecting forests. Both the necessary to save India’s huge biodiversity,” she said

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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