Fences In The Forest

Three years after the Forest Rights Act reached J&K, a tribal hamlet in Budgam remains fenced in, denied burial land, and abandoned by the very law meant to protect it.

- Dr Raja Muzaffar Bhat

I wasn't planning to stop at Nengroo Basti that day. It was 2022, and my team and I were in Darwan village, Budgam, to document delays in a rural road project. As we drove back, a small cluster of houses tucked below a slope caught my eye.

Mud walls, tin roofs, and a wire fence encircled the entire settlement. It looked less like a village and more like a low-security prison.

We pulled over and walked uphill. The moment we entered, something felt wrong.

This was not just poverty. It was abandonment. The fencing was real. Barbed wire cut across the landscape. There was no road into the village, no signs of governance, and no basic facilities.

What startled me most was not just what was missing, but what I was told.

"These fences," said Akram Nengroo, one of the elders, "are not to protect us. They're to contain us."

The 17 families living in Nengroo Basti had not migrated there on their own. They were moved in by the government in 2007 after a landslide destroyed their ancestral homes in nearby Sani Darwan. Each family was given a 7 marla plot, just over 1,900 square feet.

The government sanctioned land for a mosque and a school but forgot one basic, universal need: a graveyard.

Since then, three people have died. With no land to bury them, the community dug graves inside the mosque compound. The same small patch of land that offers spiritual refuge now holds the dead, too.

"We don't even have space to grieve properly," one woman told me. "We bury our loved ones where we pray."