India's forests were legally 'reserved' or 'protected' through the Indian Forest Act (IFA) of 1927. At that time, during the Raj era, the rationale for doing so was solely commercial: ships had to be built for maritime expansion, and railway sleepers had to be laid for the sake of commerce. Since then, in what some would say is a direct result of this legislation, access rights of forest-dwelling and dependent communities, including Adivasis, have been steadily curtailed. Many forest-dwelling communities have been displaced from forests; in addition, a substantial number still remain but without rights, forced to anxiously anticipate displacement.
In due recognition of this historical injustice, new legislation was finally drafted in 2006, known as the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest-dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act. For the first time, this new law, commonly abbreviated as RFRA, provided land and forest rights to these communities, laying out specific criteria for this recognition. These rights were also to be complemented by new responsibilities, with the local communities playing a key role in the protection of wildlife and ecologically sensitive habitats, as well as the implementation of local-level decisions on access to community-forest resources. Despite what many felt were notable steps forward, however, since 2006 this legislation has become the keystone in a bitter fight between two nominally aligned camps. (The RFRA was finally notified in January 2008.) On the one hand are those who feel that the true conservation of wildlife and wilderness requires a specific absence of human activity; on the other are those who feel that no true conservation project will ever function successfully without the active involvement of local communities. How these two sides ultimately come to agree or disagree will have significant ramifications not only for an ostensibly forward-looking legislation such as the RFRA, but more particularly for the communities that it aims at assisting.
A bit of detail about the substance of the legislation at hand is first required. The RFRA begins by defining the required relationship between local communities and the lands to which they can claim rights. Adivasi communities are required to have occupied a specific piece of land prior to 13 December 2005; other forest-dwellers need to have resided or depended on forests for three generations prior to that date. The Act also provides for rights over access to and use of 'minor' forest products, including resources that were traditionally protected or conserved. Intellectual-property rights are also provided for with regards to traditional knowledge related to biological and cultural diversity. Importantly, the Act empowers Gram Sabhas (constitutionally recognised decentralised village councils) to protect forests, wildlife and water sources, while also ensuring that Adivasi and traditional forest-dweller habitats are protected from destructive practices. Finally, the Act provides for the modification of rights or resettlement of rights-holders, if such rights have been given in critical wildlife habitats in national parks or wildlife sanctuaries. With a nod to the inherent possibility of politicisation in this, the identification of such habitats is required to be done on a case-by-case basis, on grounds of objective scientific criteria.
