---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Walter Fernandes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Apr 30, 2005 5:37 PM
Dear Friends
I understand that the e-group does not carry attachments. That
explains why you did not receive it. I am sending it again at the
bnody of the item. The good news is that the pressure from several
groups seems to have worked and the Ministry of Law seems to have
approved the Bill. It is expected to go to cabinet soon and to the
Parliament in a week. With best wishes
Walter Fernandes
REBUILD STRATEGY ON GREEN BEST
Walter Fernandes
According to a news item (The Telegraph, 9th April 2005) the Assam
Assembly has passed a resolution that the rights of families living on
forest land before 1980 should be recognised. Another news item says
that the Centre has shelved the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes
(Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill 2005 because of objections from
the Ministry of Environment and Forests. These two actions symbolise
official callousness towards the communities that have inhabited the
forests and have protected them for centuries but whom the colonial
Indian Forest Act 1927 treats as encroachers. Based on it lakhs of
families were evicted from forest land all over India in 2002.
Elephants were reportedly used in Assam to evict some 25,000 families
and to destroy their houses.
The evictions were the State's response to a question asked by the
Supreme Court about action being taken on encroachments. Most States
including Assam interpreted it as an order and evicted these families
but ignored for two decades, the Indian Forest (Conservation) Act 1980
that sought to protect the dwindling forests being destroyed mostly by
industry and also authorised the State Governments to recognise the
rights of families living in them before it came into force on October
25, 1980. But for a few States like MP, others, including Assam
ignored it. But when the Supreme Court asked a question it was among
the first to evict people from its forests. People agitated against it
all over India. The Central Bill and the Assam Assembly Resolution are
responses to it.
Also the Gauhati High Court judgement of 22nd February about 10,000
descendants of the Garo East Pakistani refugees betrays the same
callous attitude. When they fled to Assam at the Partition in 1947 the
Settlement Officer (SO) and the Sub-Divisional Officer of Lanka
sub-division of Nagaon district had allotted them land at Kharikhana
and Kharikhong but no records were maintained. In 1953 they were asked
to vacate it because it was going to be included in the Kharikhana
Fuel Reserve. After objections from the SO and people's protests 500
of their families were allotted land in the Rangkhang Reserve in the
present day Karbi Angllong (KA) but it was not regularised.
In 1977 the KA Administration told them that its settlement was under
its active consideration but no action followed. Instead, they faced
an eviction threat in 1982 and approached the High Court which
directed the State in October 1983 to dispose of their petition at an
early date. But nothing happened till 2002 when they felt the threat
of eviction once again and approached the High Court which had to fine
the KA Administration and the State because they did not even produce
the documents that their lawyer Ravi Sagar asked for. In its judgement
of 22nd February 2005 the Court ordered the State and the KA
Administration not to disturb them till they considered their
application objectively.
These instances also show the contradiction existing today between
the environment and the forest dwellers whose tradition has been one
of a balance between their needs and environmental imperatives. This
culture has got weak with timber merchants and commercial-industrial
interests cutting down forests that are their livelihood and thus
impoverishing them. It has forced them into the vicious circle of
indebtedness, bondage and destructive dependence of cutting trees as
wage labourers under timber smugglers or for sale as firewood. Studies
show that around 75% of the five million women involved in the sale of
firewood all over India are from families that were displaced by
development projects and not resettled.
A democratic response to their impoverishment would be to rebuild the
sustainable relationship that had once existed between them and the
forests but some environmentalists and the forest department (FD)
consider them enemies and want to save forests from them. Some such
environmentalists petitioned the Supreme Court to ban timber logging
in the Northeast where it had become a menace mainly because low
investment in industries and unemployment had forced people to become
labourers of timber smugglers and merchants. The 1996 Supreme Court
judgement banned logging without providing alternatives to it.
Smugglers have found ways of getting round the ban but the poor were
abandoned. Some attribute unrest in the Garo Hills to the
impoverishment it caused.
Evictions too fall in this category. Another group of
environmentalists petitioned the Apex Court to order the eviction of
encroachers and the Court asked the State Governments what they were
doing about them. Some families have certainly encroached on forest
land but most have lived there for decades, even centuries but very
few of them have had an opportunity to have their rights recorded, so
they cannot produce written documents to prove that it is their
ancestral land. The Forest Bill is an attempt to deal with this issue.
It recognises that forests are the habitat of tribals and other forest
dwellers, that they have a right to shelter and that they should be
freed from the fear of evictions. So it stipulates that the burden of
proof that they are encroachers lies with the FD and that those who
were evicted in 2002 be rehabilitated and granted a title to the land
they were cultivating.
The Assam Assembly Resolution does not go as far as that but
restricts itself to the 1980 Act that it has ignored for 25 years.
Even the Central Bill is being put in cold storage in order to protect
forests. That forests should be protected is beyond doubt. 35 million
out of India's 70 million hectares of forests are treeless. One can
boast that a third of India's forests are in the northeast but much of
it has been denuded. That shows the inability of the FD alone to
protect forests. A logical solution would be to involve forest dweller
communities in reforestation by making them equal partners with the FD
in the choice of species, maintenance, protection and benefit sharing.
In practice even what is called joint forest management (JFM) has
become a mode of the FD deciding every detail and getting the people
to implement its decisions by giving them a few benefits. Protection
of forests needs a JFM based on the people's right to their
livelihood. Their communities have lost the vested interest they had
in the past in the protection and regeneration of forests. In order to
revive it, one has to develop a JFM that treats their communities as
equal partners. They can continue to live on their ancestral land and
turn reforestation into their livelihood instead of getting income by
cutting trees. That is the only way of renewing our forest wealth.
The author is Director, North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati.
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