Forest Rights Act at 20: From ‘Healing Touch’ to Political Fault Line

When Parliament passed the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in 2006, it did so with rare unanimity. The law was framed as a moral and legal correction — a “healing touch” meant to address historical injustice faced by Adivasis and other forest-dwelling communities. Nearly two decades later, however, the Act has drifted far from that intent. What was designed as a rights-based framework has increasingly become an electoral instrument, with troubling consequences for forests, governance, and even tribal welfare itself.

How a consensus law slid into competitive politics

The FRA’s political consensus was built on a shared acknowledgement: colonial and post-colonial forest governance had dispossessed forest communities. The Act sought to recognise individual and community forest rights through local democratic institutions, primarily the Gram Sabha.

Over time, however, implementation has been shaped less by justice and more by vote arithmetic. In electorally significant tribal belts — Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh — the Act is increasingly deployed to first tolerate encroachments and then regularise them through Gram Sabha recommendations. The conflict of interest is built into the process itself: the same body that benefits from forest occupation is empowered to legitimise it.

In this environment, forest rights have quietly morphed into political currency.

The missing cut-off date and its ecological fallout

Unlike other corrective exercises dealing with historical wrongs, the FRA was left open-ended. There is no final cut-off date for filing claims. This has had profound consequences. Competitive politics has encouraged fresh encroachments, with the implicit promise of eventual regularisation.

Satellite imagery and time-series data with the Forest Department show that thousands of hectares were cleared after the Act’s 2005 eligibility cut-off. Yet local administrations, often under pressure from the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, have been encouraged to discount scientific evidence in favour of populist claims passed by Gram Sabhas. What was meant to correct past injustice has ended up incentivising new deforestation.

Gram Sabhas versus forest institutions

The FRA has also deepened institutional conflict on the ground. Joint Forest Management (JFM) Committees — designed to balance conservation with livelihoods — are increasingly sidelined. Forest officials report being reduced to bystanders, even as their technical inputs are overridden.

The silence of the forest establishment is striking. The Forest Survey of India, in its 2023 status report, flagged the ecological costs of flawed implementation. Yet this evidence has rarely translated into corrective policy action, revealing a deeper governance paralysis.

The Gadchiroli model: empowerment or cautionary tale?

Nowhere are these contradictions clearer than in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra. Celebrated by activists and MoTA as a model of community empowerment, the so-called “Gadchiroli Model” of bamboo management is often showcased as proof that community forest rights can deliver both livelihoods and conservation.

A closer look tells a different story. While villages like Mendha-Lekha became symbols of “bamboo liberation”, large parts of the district witnessed over-extraction. Under the banner of Community Forest Rights, bamboo harvesting expanded to industrial scales, bypassing the scientific working plans traditionally used by the Forest Department. Without technical oversight, bamboo clumps were harvested for quick cash, ignoring biological regeneration cycles. Vast tracts of once-dense bamboo forests now stand reduced to stumps.

Similar patterns — including the reopening of previously rejected claims — are being documented in Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.

Historical context the debate ignores

Ironically, India’s forest governance once experimented with far more people-centric approaches. Under Dietrich Brandis, the first Inspector General of Forests appointed in 1864, forest reservation explicitly left large areas around villages for community use. Rights and objections were publicly announced, sometimes literally beaten out on drums.

The real breakdown came later, when elite capture, post-Independence consolidation of princely and zamindari forests, and unresolved disputes accumulated. Sub-divisional committees set up in 1989 failed to resolve claims. Into this vacuum stepped political mobilisation — encouraging encroachments and regularisation demands that eventually overwhelmed institutional processes.

The FRA, enacted in 2006 under the UPA government with Left support, was also a political response to the NDA government’s 2004 decision to regularise pre-1980 encroachments under the Forest Conservation Act. Either intervention, had it been implemented impartially and scientifically, could have transformed tribal welfare.

Why the Act needs urgent review

The core problem today is not the idea of forest rights, but their politicisation. By allowing indefinite claims and sidelining ecological science, the FRA risks producing a paradox: titled citizens in landscapes stripped of forests, rivers running dry, and carbon sinks destroyed at precisely the moment climate resilience is most needed.

A first, unavoidable step is fixing a final cut-off date for claims. Equally urgent is a transparent review of high-profile models like Gadchiroli, through a white paper led by the Secretary (Forests), the Director General of Forests, and state forest leadership. Professional bodies such as the Indian Forest Service Association must also reclaim their mandate to ensure the Act serves genuine tribal interests, not electoral expediency.

Rights cannot survive without forests

True forest rights were meant to give communities a stake in conservation, not to carve up India’s last ecological buffers. As climate stress intensifies, healthy forests are indispensable for water security, agriculture and ecological stability.

Depoliticising the Forest Rights Act is no longer optional. Without course correction, India risks hollowing out both its forests and the very idea of justice the law was meant to uphold.