BehanVox: A Hunger Strike in Thane Reveals the Failings of Forest Rights Act
This week in BehanVox: a long-awaited verdict in the Pollachi sexual assault case, the fall of French cinema legend Gérard Depardieu, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox. The hysteria generated by an unabashedly and dangerously populist media seeking intensified confrontation with Pakistan has eased but not ended. Armchair warriors and Whatsapp crusaders pumped on the adrenaline of the events are apparently furious about this. We, at BehanBox, hope peace prevails and the balanced voices of news dissemination that we recommended last week find more takers. This week we delve into the reasons why the Forest Rights Act does not help Adivasis whose once-forested homes now lie at the heart of our urban sprawls. And a look at the growing digital labour overload for Tamil Nadu’s Anganwadi workers.
Story So Far
Parvati Mahale’s home in Thane’s Chirag Nagar area was set amidst 5 gunthas of land, shaded by lovingly raised drumstick, mango, amla and ramphal trees. Losing her home to an eviction drive was bad enough but what made it even more painful was that the bulldozer uprooted her beloved trees as well.
For well over a fortnight, Parvati and other Adivasi residents of Chirag Nagar have been on a hunger strike outside the collectorate demanding justice and ownership rights over the land for which they have been paying non-agricultural land taxes since 1952.
For Parvati and her family, like several others, this has been home for five generations, from a time when the area was not a lucrative piece of property for developers.
The crux of the problem here is rooted in a legal grey area around the rights of Adivasi communities—the applicability and implementation of forest rights in urban areas. In 2006, the Forest Rights Act was passed with an aim to undo the historic injustice faced by India’s indigenous Adivasi people. But the act’s rural-centric definitions and provisions have alienated similar rights for communities that now live in urban areas.
A similar crisis is brewing in Mumbai’s Aarey forest. Since Independence, over 34 projects have fragmented the 3,200 acre lush and dense forest that act as a buffer for the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. As these projects came up, the Adivasi residents of the area started getting displaced and those who stayed faced routine harassment.
Tied to these stories of displacement of Adivasis is the much touted slum rehabilitation scheme – for these settlements have turned into slums with growing populations. For giving up their lands, the Adivasis are given a tiny flat in the new complexes that come up there. But these are no improvement on their original homes and in many cases make for a worse option.
The impacted Adivasis should have been protected by the Forest Rights Act which recognised the historical injustice meted out to these forest dwelling communities. A key provision of the act is that it made Gram Sabha consent mandatory for diversion of forests, providing communities with the rights to self-govern their forests. But this made the law village-centric, leaving Adivasis living in the heart of our cities vulnerable, argues Shreya Raman in a lucid analysis of the crisis of displacement.
An Anganwadi worker in Chennai told our reporter Archita Raghu, and only half jokingly, that if a parent were to peep into her centre they would think that the children are being neglected – for the workers appear to be forever on their phones.
We have been reporting consistently on the intrusive nature of the digitisation of the work of frontline health and welfare workers over the past four years (here, here and here). Not only has it led to a huge rise in the workload of the workers but also turned them from care givers to data clerks and heightened surveillance against them by demanding that facial recognition apps be used to mark presence and delivery of schemes.
In Tamil Nadu, the Anganwadi workers have double the load imposed by the Poshan Tracker app that monitors the delivery of welfare schemes for women and children. For, they also have to manage a state run app that does the same because TN authorities find the Central one inadequate for its needs.
We watched Selvi, an Anganwadi worker, as she struggled through the workday. It was only when the group photograph of her 20-odd children was uploaded that Selvi could access the details necessary for her to mark attendance, take photos and finally proceed with her duties as a preschool teacher. Comforting a crying child while handing two eggs to a parent, she points to two new updates on family surveys, and children’s malnutrition.
Jayanthi, a Chennai-based worker, counts on her fingers the digital tasks on hand: Poshan Tracker, TN ICDS app, Aadhaar to crosscheck ID details, a block-level app for registering voters, and a few Whatsapp groups for coordination. “We do this work despite conducting home visits for children and mothers, carrying weights and scales,” she points out.
The trouble with this trend is that it positions digital proof as the only effective means of monitoring processes, say experts. Anyone who cannot or will not produce it is viewed as inefficient or worse, corrupt.
Read our story here.
Talking Point
An Icon Falls, Finally: Gérard Depardieu, the French cinema legend, has been given an 18 month suspended sentence after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women during a film shoot in 2021. This is said to be a critical juncture in France’s reckoning with the #MeToo movement which had initially received pushback from many in the country’s celebrities and intelligentsia including women. France has been accused time and again of not taking accusations of sexual misbehaviour seriously enough. The Pelicot case has jolted the administration into making a difference. Sexual violence and harassment are rampant in the country’s entertainment industry, a French parliamentary report concluded. It accused the country’s legal system of failing survivors. Much of the sexist behaviour in France is dismissed as “gallantry”.
Conservative Not Supportive: The Republican pronatalist drive, led by several luminaries of the Trump administration, is getting some pushback from parents for ignoring pertinent issues of childcare and its costs and its impact on women’s labour. This article argues that the current pronatalist push is actually aimed at a return to conservative family values and not so much to help families create conditions to have more children.
Gender Protests: There have been rallies across Britain where thousands protested after the Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by “biological sex”, reports Impact. The consequences are already being felt, it says, pointing to the British Transport Police announcement that trans women held in custody will now be strip-searched by male officers. Also from June 1, trans women will no longer be able to play in women’s football in England.
Pollachi: A sessions court in Coimbatore on Tuesday convicted nine men accused of sexual assault on several women in Pollachi district of Tamil Nadu. The incidents dated between 2016 and 2018 and the case became a political battleground for the DMK and AIDMK each accusing the other of links with criminals. In the end, it had been the determination of one 19-year-old survivor that saw justice done.
BehanVox Recommends
Freedom and fundamental rights: Bhojpuri singer and satirist Neha Singh Rathore discusses freedom of expression in a conversation with NWMI member and founder of Shades of Rural India, Neetu Singh. After raising questions about the Pahalgam attack, Neha was slapped with criminal charges for “acts endangering the sovereignty, integrity and unity of India.”
The womanosphere spectacle: As the world continues to debate the impact of the manosphere, Anna Silman, in The Guardian, highlights the dangers of how popular personalities like Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, and outlets like Evie, are pushing forward a gender-essentialist worldview.
Caste and occupation: Sumeet Mhaskar examines the interplay between caste and occupational choices in a modern, urban industrial setting in India, in the research paper ‘The Caste, Occupations, and (Im)mobility in Modern Indian Industry, 1870–2006.”
Digital detox: ‘Digital nutritionist’ Kaitlyn Regehr shares measures to cut down screen time, from pruning one’s algorithm to turning your phone to greyscale.
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