The fate of lakhs of forest dwellers hangs fire as the battle for control of Maharashtra’s mammoth forest cover galvanises, with green lobbies, bureaucrats, activists and environmentalists of all stripes — all determined to see their respective ideologies emerge winner — fighting a proxy war over two sets of legislation intended to protect the rights of such communities.
At the centre of the battle are the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the newer Maharashtra Village Forest Rules, 2014. The latter has drawn flak from various quarters, and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has now announced a national campaign against alleged attempts by the Narendra Modi and Maharashtra governments to dilute the FRA and replace it with the ‘business-friendly’, ‘anti-tribal’ Maharashtra Village Forest Rules (MVFR), 2014.
The contrasting provisions of the MVFR and FRA have come to a head since the BJP-led government cajoled the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MOTA) to lift its moratorium during a meeting of the Group of Officers (GoO) at the Cabinet Secretariat on November 17, 2015 in New Delhi.
The Union tribal affairs ministry had been issuing warnings against implementing the MVFR, saying it would constitutionally undermine the FRA, threaten rights already granted under that Act, dilute the powers of the gram sabha and give control back to the notorious forest department ‘to the detriment of the ST and traditional forest dwellers’.
The State government had framed the MVFR based on claims that the FRA was leading to widespread encroachment of forest areas and loss of green cover to cultivation. A study of the failure to manage the ‘commons’ of the State’s forests by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), commissioned by the Devendra Fadnavis government, claims that nearly 1,00,000 hectare of forest land were lost to FRA claims. “After enactment of FRA, large-scale encroachments are taking place post December 2005, with the hope of them being regularised,” the TERI report said.
Resistance to the MVFR
The new legislation had run into resistance from K Sankaranarayanan, then Governor of Maharashtra and a veteran Kerala Congressman, as well. On July 9, 2014, weeks before he resigned after being transferred to Mizoram by the newly-elected NDA government, Sankaranarayanan wrote to the State government: “The provisio in Rule 1 (3) about the choice of gram sabha is ultra vires to both the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, 1996 as well as the FRA. By adopting these rules, the gram sabhas risk forgoing many of the statutory rights guaranteed to them under FRA and PESA.”
According to ministry documents accessed by The Hindu, the latest MOTA nod has come with explicit riders asking the State to incorporate a provision for rights already granted under FRA to not be reviewed under MVFR and protect rights pending settlement under FRA at all costs. It also said the State government must confirm its claims that gram sabhas are constituted at the hamlet level. “After this, the Government of Maharashtra may go ahead with MVFR where there are neither Forest Dwelling Schedule Tribes nor other Traditional Dwellers,” the Union tribal affairs ministry had said.
Armed with MOTA green signal, the State government has been laying the ground for implementing MVFR in non-FRA and PESA areas. Already, 32 villages have been declared Gram Vans (village forests) in Nagpur, 25 in Chandrapur, 12 in Pune, three in Yavatmal and two each in Gondia, Amravati and Buldhana under MVFR.
These resolutions, however, were passed much before MOTA had ordered that MVFR be kept in abeyance. “This is a second attempt at government interference. On August 15, 2014 the State government had organised special gram sabhas in the Gadchiroli region and forced the passing of a resolution that mandated a forest official on the gram samiti. The MVFR is now being implemented with an administrative order, not with people participation,” said a member of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram Samiti, an RSS-affiliated body and one of the biggest organisations in the country fighting for tribal rights.
In this multi-dimensional fight over conflicting provisions of the MVFR and FRA, forest rights activists in favour of the latter Act believe the MVFR will affect tribals who have already been granted 1,05,506 individual and 2,606 community rights under FRA. They believe that the new legislation will also devolve control over minor forest produce to the State forest department-supervised Joint Forest Management Committees (JFMC) while reducing the powers of the gram sabhas. As the process of granting individual claims under FRA is incomplete, this constitutionally allows another set of rules to take away rights and powers.
Left and Right
The ideological division is stark as well. A workshop organised on October 15, 2015 by the forest department to review FRA at Mumbai’s Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini, a charitable trust named after a former BJP legislator, allegedly left out 20 forest rights activists who had worked closely with the erstwhile Congress government to frame the FRA.
“We have a very strong feeling that the whole purpose is to not further the cause of important provisions like Community Forest Rights but to rather send a message to policy makers that the FRA is being misused, based on the much-criticised TERI report,” said Purnima Upadhyay of Yavatmal-based NGO Khoj.
Others claimed they were left out of the FRA debate by the Left-leaning lobby groups. “There are many reports on the ground reality which show that the FRA is being wrongly implemented. I have been working on forest and tribal development in Jalgaon district for the last 20 years, but have been ignored by these groups and the State tribal welfare department,” said Rajendra Nannaware, convenor of the Satpuda Foundation, in his letter to the State forest department.
Anna Hazare, who shot off a letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi against senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar’s outburst over Fadnavis’s decision to implement the MVFR, told The Hindu, “People like Mani Shankar Aiyar who blindly support Left ideologies and Acts like the FRA must come out of their AC rooms and see how well the MVFR is working. When I had gone to him to talk about forest rights as a minister, he spoke to me for less than seven minutes before leaving, saying he had a party to attend. If these are the kind of people who defend forest rights, then our tribals have no future.”
Hira Bhai from Menda Lekha, a village in Gadchiroli that was first in the state to implement the FRA, added, “The MVFR has been given backdoor entry by the BJP government in its bid to wrest control of the forests of Maharashtra. If they wanted to review the FRA, they should have also reviewed the Indian Forest Act. After all, the MVFR was formulated by using a provision of the Indian Forest Act.”
