Dangerous dilution

Change of Forest Rights Act in three states will hit forest-dwelling communities hard

- ISHAN KUKRETI

IN MAY-END, Maharashtra, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, where over one-fourth of India’s tribes live, changed a law meant to protect them. They modified the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, or FRA, threatening to make the forest-dwelling communities even more vulnerable.

On May 18, Maharashtra governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari, using his powers under Schedule V of the Constitution, notified an amendment in Section 6 of FRA. Now, a divisional-level committee would serve as the appellate body to examine people’s grievances. As per the government, the change would help serve justice to tribal people whose individual or community rights have been rejected by the district-level committee.

Creation of the new appellate body has taken many by surprise because under the FRA provisions, a state-level monitoring body already exists to oversee the process. “On several occasions, state-level bodies have asked the district-level committees to review their decisions. It’s a different matter that state-level committees, which are supposed to meet once every two months, do not meet. Creating another body will only complicate matters,” says Shomona Khanna, a Supreme Court advocate and former legal counsel of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA). “It will also reduce the claimants’ ability to approach higher courts to challenge the decision of the district-level committee, as the courts would hold that an appellate body has already rejected the claim,” she adds.