How India’s Forest Governance Is Increasingly Loaded Against Forest Dwelling Communities
From Uttarakhand to Karnataka, forest officials are violently evicting forest dwelling communities, disregarding their rights to the forests and its resources. The crux of the problem lies in the way India governs its forests
Zainab Khatoon, 50, said she could not even count the number of forest officials and police cars that had surrounded their village, Tumadiya Khatta in Uttarakhand’s Ramnagar, on May 22. “So many higher ranking officials had come. There were four JCBs, two big police vans and a tractor full of babool trees. They dug deep trenches around our houses, destroyed our wheat crops and planted the babool in their place,” she said.
“It has become dangerous for us to enter and exit our houses. What if one of our children or animals falls into the trench? With the rain arriving soon, it will become more treacherous,’ she said.
The village, on the fringes of the Jim Corbett National Park, has been home to Zainab and others from the Van Gujjar community for decades. The Muslim pastoral community are historically based in the western Himalayan regions and rely on herding buffaloes and selling milk and milk products for sustenance. While Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir recognise the community as a Scheduled Tribe, in Uttarakhand, they are categorised as an Other Backward Class (OBC).
Traditionally, Van Gujjars migrated to the upper Himalayas during summers to graze their cattle and moved down to the foothills during the winters. But over time, due to urbanisation and conservation policies restricting their movement, many have settled in fixed locations like Tumadiya Khatta. The community members said that they have been living there since the early 1900s and that they have been paying grazing license fees since 1957.
When the forest officials destroyed their crops in late May, they did not protest. “We did not say anything because we were afraid they would destroy our houses too,” said Zainab.
Her fear was not unfounded.
Exactly 10 years ago, on May 21, 2015, forest officials, without any notice, had similarly come in large numbers and destroyed their houses and crops. “There might have been around 1,000 officials then. They beat us up and destroyed everything—our houses, bathrooms, water connection,” said Zainab, who was among those who were injured. “We went to the police station too but no one took our complaint.”
In December 2015, 31 families in the area filed claims under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act—popularly called the FRA. Under the act, Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwelling communities that have been living in the area for three generations are eligible for individual and community rights over the forest and its resources to live, collect minor forest produce and graze their animals.
Despite repeated inquiries and multiple RTI requests, they are yet to receive an update from the officials. Meanwhile, forest officials have been routinely trying to evict them by terming them as “encroachers”. Since 2015, the officials have filed criminal cases against the community members, cut off their electricity supply and sent multiple eviction notices. The latest notice that they received was on April 28.
The community members had approached the High Court to appeal against this. The case was lined up to be heard on June 11 but the forest officials destroyed the crops and dug the land without waiting for the hearing. On June 16, the court while referring to FRA said that no eviction can take place until the hearing is complete. It also allowed the communities to continue with their agriculture.
The act, passed in 2006 and enacted in 2008, marked a significant shift in forest governance policies from being largely exclusionary to rights-based. But poor implementation of the act combined with the disproportionate powers and resources held by forest departments, make such eviction attempts possible, as we detail later.
Moreover, over the last decade, multiple attempts have been made to change the way we govern forests, all aimed at ensuring ease for private entities to extract the resources.
Forest Department Vs Adivasi Communities
“We have been living here as long as the plants and trees. But these outsiders who don’t understand the land are telling us to leave,” JK Putti, 70, told Maktoob. Putti belongs to one of the 52 families from the Jenu Kuruba tribe who, on May 6, marched to reclaim their ancestral village of Karadikallu Attur Kolli Haadi in Karnataka’s Nagarahole Tiger Reserve. 40 years ago, they were evicted from the reserve.
Jenu Kurubas, a honey gathering tribe, are one of the four tribal groups indigenous to Nagarahole. The area was declared as a wildlife sanctuary in 1955 and 30 years later, in 1986, it became a part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, the first such reserve to be established in India.
The 18 biosphere reserves in India were introduced under UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere(MAB) programme which recognises the role of local populations in conserving biodiversity. The Jenu Kurubas are admired by scientists worldwide for their relationship with bees, their knowledge about their movement and honey collection and are known to live in harmony with the forest.
However, instead of working with the community, forest officials around 1985 started forcibly evicting them from their villages. “They told us we were hindering conservation. They scared, tortured, threatened us daily, and elephants stampeded our fields, and tore apart our homes. We didn’t know the law back then,” Susheela, one of the protestors who marched back to the village, told Behanbox.
Since then, multiple forced evictions were carried out in the tiger reserve. In the early 1990s, around 350 families were evicted, another 250 were dispossessed between 1999 and 2002. Over the last two decades, nearly a third of the 2,785 Adivasi families in Nagarahole were relocated.
As compensation, some of the families were offered Rs 10 lakh and 3 acres of land but many say they did not receive the full amount while the land given to them was uncultivable, per a 2022 fact-finding report. The report also found that some of the community members were cheated out of their compensation by wildlife NGOs who promised to fix their lands and build borewells but absconded with the money.
With no other options available, the community whose cultural, spiritual and social identity revolves around forests soon were forced into bonded labour at plantations in Kodagu.
Since 2010, many Jenu Kuruba families have made multiple attempts to return to their villages but they were beaten up and harassed each time, said the 2022 report. On May 6, the 52 families who reached their ancestral village and conducted ceremonial rituals were met with over 100 paramilitary troops of the forest department, police, and the Special Tiger Protection Force (STPF)–all deployed to intimidate and threaten them.
The officials blocked the roads and barred entry for journalists. On May 14, the forest department put up a board at the entrance of the village saying, “As per Section 27 of WLPA [Wildlife Protection Act] 1972, trespassing in a Tiger Reserve is a punishable offence”.
In response, on May 20, the community members conducted the first Gram Sabha in their village in 40 years and decided to put up another board next to it. It started with: “Under Section 9 of the Forest Rights Act 2006: Our forests, our lands, our rule”.
On June 17, the forest department, citing sections of the Wildlife Protection Act, issued notices to the community members to dismantle the huts that they had built and two days later, the officials destroyed six of these huts.
The situation in Nagarahole and in Tumadiya Khatta is emblematic of how India’s forest governance runs on two parallel tracts. On the one hand, there is consolidation of powers with the forest departments which practice exclusionary conservation policies largely derived from the colonial framework of resource extraction by violating the rights of the forest dwelling communities. On the other, rights-based legislations like the FRA attempts to decentralise this power by vesting power with the Gram Sabhas to decide how the forests should be governed.
The FRA, in spirit, is very different from other existing forest laws and that creates conflict, said Neema Pathak Broome, a member of the Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group, a non-profit working on environmental and social issues. The FRA is the most comprehensive national law that talks about forests and forest rights for which the forest department is not the nodal agency.
“That does create a lot of issues, because the forest department always thought that they were the primary authority to be thinking, talking and governing forests,” said Neema.
Moreover, there is also a disparity in resources between the Ministry of Tribal Affairs , which implements FRA and the forest department. Because of the department’s longstanding control over forests, the tribal affairs ministry and other departments like agriculture and revenue rely on the forest department for advice on how to implement the law in forest areas.
“An institution like the forest department, which was established 200 years ago, is well endowed with resources and staff. Meanwhile, the tribal affairs department has been given a mandate that it had not traditionally held and that too with very few resources,” said Neema.
Evolution of Forest Governance Policies
The forest department created in 1864 as the Imperial Forest Department was rooted in the understanding of scientific management of forestry, particularly from German foresters, said Arpitha Kodiveri, an environmental law and justice scholar and the author of the 2024 book Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests. “The objective was to maximise yield by scientifically governing these forests in order to provide better timber for the colonial state. It was never about conserving biodiversity. So, the communities who were stewarding these lands, in some ways, became a barrier to that realisation,” she said.
The Indian Forest Acts passed in 1868 and 1927 established authority of the forest department over the lands and waters in the forests. “The colonial policies through forest officials and the creation of the forest acts declared all forests as government land and that the communities only have ‘privileges’ to live on these lands,” said Arpitha, adding that this dispossession also completely eliminated the question of self-governance.
After India became independent, one would expect this exclusionary approach to change, said Neema. “But unfortunately, if you look at how the laws have developed and how the forest department has tried to consolidate their control over the forest, it has only become more strict, more stringent, and more exclusionary of the local communities,” she said, despite the government signing on Global Biodiversity Frameworks where implementation of conservation laws is mandated to be operated within the globally established human rights frameworks.
During the constituent assembly debates, Adivasi leader Jaipal Singh Munda called for reparations and pushed for the community’s inalienable rights to the land. These discussions, that were termed as the “tribal question”, became the basis for Schedule 5 and 6 of the Constitution that provides for a different administration process for tribal pockets.
“Through the Constitution, we recognise scheduled areas but it does not give the amount of decentralisation of power and authority to Adivasi communities as Munda would have preferred. We also did not see much innovation on the forest governance question,” said Arpitha.
Until the 1970s, the forests were considered as resources to be exploited to serve the needs of the nation. In 1979, after a secret note from the agriculture ministry to the cabinet on degradation of forests, the focus shifted to conserving forests and protecting the wildlife with the passing of the Wildlife Protection Act in 1972, The Forest (Conservation) Act in 1980 and the drafting of the first National Forest Policy in 1988.
“The policy recognised that Adivasis have to be part of the problem-solving around conservation, but it doesn’t starkly recognise their rights,” said Arpitha, adding how this created an exclusionary conservation paradigm that dispossesses forest-dwelling communities while consolidating powers with the forest department.
In 1996, when the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas Act) PESA was passed, Gram Sabhas were, for the first time, given powers in Scheduled Areas. The FRA further expanded on this and became the most comprehensive rights-based legislation.
However, both acts are fraught with implementation issues. Of the 10 states where areas under the fifth schedule exist, two (Odisha and Jharkhand) have not yet framed PESA rules. And in states where the rules have been enacted, bureaucratic hurdles hinder the implementation of the act.
Criminalisation of Communities
As of March 2025, only 49% of the 51 lakh individual and community rights claims filed under FRA have led to distribution of titles. While titles have been distributed in majority of claims in Andhra Pradesh (79%) and Chhattisgarh (56%), states like Karnataka and Uttarakhand lag behind with only 5.5% and 2.7% of the titles being distributed respectively. Of the 3,091 community forest rights claims in Uttarakhand, the title has been distributed only in one case.
The forest rights act is a great law but government officials are not following it, said Rose Xaxa, an activist based in Jharkhand’s Gumla. “We have had to open the law books and point out to officials to get forest rights,” she said.
In Gumla’s Palkot Wildlife Sanctuary, Rose has helped many community members get individual and community forest resource rights, but the claims that were filed last year are not being recognised. “I met the Sub-Divisional Officer who said that she is ready to sign it but she said that the divisional forest officer (DFO) is not allowing it,” said Rose. As per FRA, the forest department has no mandate to ascertain, approve or reject the claims but in practice that is not the case.
“The DFO told me that he will not give the rights no matter what I do. I was so angry that I wanted to yell at him but I did not. Resource rights are the most important because without it we will not be able to collect and sell forest produce like tendu leaves,” she said. Among all states, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh are best performing in terms of recognition of these resource rights but even they have only recognised only 36% and 24% of the potential area respectively.
Access to these rights enables communities to autonomously organise the sale of non-timber forest produce like mahua, tendu and charoli, which constitute as much as 40% of the household income. Diversion of forests impacts women, who collect these produce the most, we had reported in April 2024.
In a recent incident in Madhya Pradesh’s Burhanpur, the forest officials made a verbal claim of rejection of 8,000 forest rights claims and threatened to evict the Adivasi communities. The officials forced them to stop farming and seized bulls and tractors. On June 9, over 10,000 people protested in the city and over one and a half hours questioned the assistant district magistrate (ADM) over the legality of these actions.
“We are teaching the officials what the law says, that such eviction cannot happen without any notice,” said Asha Bai, a member of the Jagrit Dalit Adivasi Sangathan (JADS). As per FRA, any rejection of the claim has to be communicated in person to the claimant. In a letter to the chief minister, the protestors wrote, “We are being accused of ‘encroaching’ on the same land that we have been farming on for generations.”
The forest department in both colonial and independent India, has claimed its authority over the forest lands. In doing so, it has constantly criminalized the people living in these landscapes as ‘encroachers’ and ‘poachers’, said Aditi Vajpeyi, an independent researcher.
The Indian Forest Acts, that categorised forests as protected forests, reserved forests and village forests, also brought in the concepts of ‘encroachment’ and ‘forest offences’, which, even today, is being used to criminalise and intimidate forest dwellers. In Tumadiya Khatta, three criminal cases were filed against 53-year-old Mohammad Shafi and his two brothers in 2016—two of which are under the Indian Forest Act of 1927. After a long legal battle, in 2023, the accused were acquitted in all the cases.
“They filed fake cases accusing us of cutting down trees, destroying fences built by the forest department and physically assaulting officials. But the court has declared us innocent,” said Zainab.
In 1985, after members of the Jenu Kuruba community protested against a three-star resort in Nagarahole, multiple cases were filed against the protestors. The Karnataka High Court passed an order striking down the agreement between the state government and the Taj Group, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court. This victory motivated the community members to fight against the forced evictions, which resulted in more criminal cases against the community members, found the fact-finding report.
“A lot of the rights that the FRA recognises are categorised as offences in the Forests Act,” said Arpitha adding that forest departments not only have power to govern but also to police. “So you can see mass arrests of communities under wildlife and forest offences, which are threatening. Because it means communities have to go to the court and deal with unnecessary arrests. And because the forest department has so much discretionary power, the evidence is usually very flimsy in these cases,” she said.
When Forests Are On Sale
Since 2014, the Indian government has been trying to change the governance structure, primarily to ensure ease of business. In 2014, the central government constituted a high-level committee headed by former cabinet secretary TSR Subramaniam to review the laws and processes of the environment ministry.
This committee recommended quicker environment clearances, creation of a single-window for obtaining environment, forest and coastal regulation clearances and an umbrella environment management law. It also recommended creation of an “Indian Environment Service”, a cadre similar to the Indian Forest Service that will provide expertise to public and private sectors on management of environmental issues.
The then environment minister, Prakash Javadekar hailed the report as a historic achievement that will help “balance developmental commitments and environment protection”. But the report was rejected by a parliamentary standing committee.
But the government’s attempts to tweak forest governance laws continued. In 2018, the draft of a new forest policy was introduced, which said that public-private participation models will be developed for undertaking afforestation and reforestation activities, a move that could threaten the rights of forest-dwelling communities.
While the draft was revised a couple of times, no final decision has been made so far, creating a vacuum for an overarching and comprehensive framework in governing forests.
In 2023, the Forest Conservation Act of 1980 was amended, which gives the government more power to approve diversion of forests for “non-forest purposes” and in direct violation of the FRA, undermines the power of the gram sabha. Some estimates say that these changes could open up 25% of India’s forests for urbanisation and industrial projects.
The Supreme Court is hearing a batch of petitions challenging the amendment’s constitutionality. In February this year, while hearing these cases, the Supreme Court said that no forest land can be diverted unless the same amount of land is given for compensatory afforestation.
In 2016, the government passed the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act with an aim to create a carbon sink of 2.5-3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030, as per its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions.
But this framework has turned forests into a commodity and alienated forest-dwelling communities further. As per the Act, any diversion for non-forest use requires that project developers pay state forest departments for afforestation in a non-forest land of equal size or degraded forest land of double the size. And because newly afforested trees cannot provide the same economic value in terms of timber and other resources, project developers were also mandated to pay a “net present value” for any diversion.
This has essentially allowed companies to purchase forest land, said researcher and activist Soumitra Ghosh in an interview to Mongabay.
By 2019, the fund had accumulated over Rs 56,000 crore which was transferred to state governments to offset the diversion of 1.24 lakh hectares of forests. By law this would require afforestation in equal or more areas of land. But in a land-stressed country, the forest department is siphoning off land from marginal rural communities and Adivasis to undertake these projects, found a 2019 report by IndiaSpend.
The total land taken up for compensatory afforestation doubled from around 48,000 hectares in 2018 to around 1 lakh hectares in 2022-23 (full dataset on Dataful here).
Each state recommends a certain tree species for plantation, and bamboo, teak and eucalyptus are the popular choices. This choice is made without considering its wider ecological value and planting non-native invasive species can take over and destroy entire ecosystems.
One of the popular trees used in these plantation drives is the babool that was planted in Tumadiya Khatta. Colloquially called vilayati babool, or ‘foreign’ babool, the plant is invasive and thorny. They take over entire ecosystems while preventing forest-dependent communities and animals from accessing the forest.
Under the Green Credit Programme, launched two years ago, the government has created an “inventory” of forest lands and private companies can earn green credits by paying the forest departments to plant trees on these. This, said Aditi, shows that the policy landscape is moving from compensatory afforestation to a more nuanced nexus between the state and private players.
“All this plantation is happening on community forest resource lands or individual forest land where forest dwellers hold legal rights. The land banks are being identified without the consent and without any convergence with FRA. The forest department has opposed FRA since its enactment and not aligned its workings in line with the act. Now, we are seeing a rise in legal policy shifts that are aimed at privatisation of forests and resources. All these shifts are aimed at diluting the powers of FRA,” said Aditi.
(Archita Raghu contributed to this report from Chennai)
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