Forest Rights

The National Forum for Forest People and Forest Workers (NFFPFW) had been at the forefront of the struggle for the enactment of the Forest Act which was ultimately passed in December 2006 which was much diluted than the draft bill. Since then various constituents of the NFFPFW across the country have been engaged in, often violent, struggles for the implementation of the Act. The struggle for the recognition of forest workers and their right over the forest produce for living and livelihood has been a long one. While the Rules for the Act were being formulated, the State Forest Departments were forcefully evicting all forest dwellers so that they would have no access to the benefits that the act guaranteed. NFFPFW has been struggling for strengthening the joint and collective ownership for forest workers and forest people, to ensure that a protective mechanism is set in place to prevent land grab and alienation once the rights are granted to forest dwellers and to protect the forests from being given away to corporates for commercial purposes.

A People’s Assembly was organised on 18 December 2008 at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. Adivasi and dalit forest dwellers from eight Indian states — Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal and Bihar participated in it. On 17 December, the forest workers marched to the Parliament, demanding a proper implementation of the Forest Rights Act. The rally was attended by more than 3,500 adivasis and dalits from various forest regions, including Lakhimpur Kheri, Sonbhadra (Kaimur), Raipur, Mahasamund, different regions of Jharkhand, Rewa, Manikpur, Saharanpur, Dehradun and Badwani. They demanded for an immediate stop to evictions in national parks and sanctuaries by the Forest Department and the police; to reinstate community rights over minor forest produce; to ensure representation of all forest dwelling communities in the Forest Rights Committees at the village level and also to ensure representation of people’s organisations working with forest communities in the state-level monitoring committees and district-level committees, constituted under FRA; to convert Taungiya and other forest villages into revenue villages and to remove the provision for producing documentary evidence by some forest people to prove their traditional rights over three generations. The Assembly submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister. Copies of the memorandum were submitted to the Lok Sabha Speaker, the minister for Tribal Affairs and the minister for Social Justice and empowerment.

There has been a growing collective consciousness among forest workers about their rights but the process of unionising them has met with several hurdles. Mass organisations with large membership of women and women leaders have emerged in the forest areas which have led the struggles in these areas against the state.

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