From rxpgnews.com
The tribal's fight for his forest
By By Shankar Gopalakrishnan,
Nov 30, 2006 - 2:39:07 PM
Among people in urban India, the tribal is a curious figure from a faraway world. Suddenly, the tribals and forest dwellers are marching in cities as never before. Delhi saw a huge demonstration by Gond tribals Wednesday. More protests and marches are planned in December and January. Their single demand is the passage of the Scheduled Tribes - Bill, 2005 with some amendments.
This arcane demand hardly seems reason enough to bring tens of thousands of people on to the streets. Yet they are here and it is time to ask why.
Contrary to notions that forests are 'uninhabited wilderness,' many people, mostly tribals, live inside India's forests. Estimates say four million people live in our national parks and sanctuaries alone, never mind the much larger area of reserved and protected forests. Many have been there for generations.
But most are today deemed 'encroachers' because their existence was not recorded in official records under the Indian Forests Act. Indeed, the implementation of the act is so tardy that 82 percent of Madhya Pradesh's forest blocks have never been surveyed, and 40 percent of Orissa's reserved forests were 'deemed' so without surveys.
Nationally, the forest department records 7.66 million hectares more area than the revenue department. The government simply doesn't know if these 7.66 million hectares - an area twice the size of Kerala - are forests or not!
No forest management plan takes account of this. No wildlife protection plan considers it. The law lives in a fantasy world where forests' only human inhabitants are 'encroachers'.
Many people benefit from this fantasy. Forest guards extort bribes by threatening forest dwellers with eviction. Commercial plantations, industries and land grabbers can take over people's land or forestland with a payoff to the forest guard. And the whole system turns extremely corrupt and destructive, for, except a handful of environmentalists, the people who are directly interested in forests are all in the forest department's power.
In areas where the community wants to protect its forests, such as the 10,000 Orissa villages engaged in community forest management or the van panchayats - of Uttaranchal, it has to constantly fight to do so. Thus both forests and forest dwellers lose out.
This is why people are now out on the streets. For the stated aim of the forest rights bill is to give these dwellers the legal right to the land or forest resources that they have been using -. Thus it forces the government to acknowledge reality and record people's rights.
But beneficiaries of the current scenario, not least the government itself, will not accept change without a fight. Their resistance has ensured that the bill establishes the correct principles, but then pulls the rug out from under its own feet.
Among other things, it gives local officials total power over people's rights, excludes the entire non-scheduled tribe forest dwelling population and insists that any land claimed should have been continuously occupied since 1980 - 26 years - during which millions of people have been forced into new areas through displacement or eviction, precisely because they had no recorded rights. This is a return to the mentality that forest dwellers are trespassers.
The controversy forced the government to send the bill to a joint parliamentary committee -, which sat for three months and came to a unanimous conclusion. The best way to ensure justice and conservation is to do exactly what is being done elsewhere, namely enhancing transparency, accountability and democracy, it said.
Therefore, in this bill, the basic rule should be to include as many people as possible -, to set in place democratic and transparent institutions of deciding on rights -, and to avoid arbitrary restrictions.
The committee also recommended that communities should have the legal right to protect forests, something now illegal. At heart, the committee essentially said that forest dwellers are partners in conservation, not its enemies. Forest dwellers are equal citizens with equal rights.
And this is why forest dwellers are marching into cities. They are fighting to claim their most fundamental right - to a life with dignity in their own homes. It is not a right that will be won easily. The government and vested interests are fiercely resisting the JPC and the bill. But it is the only way that either forests or forest dwellers will survive.
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