Representative image
| Photo Credit: MURALI KUMAR K
Ahead of the Supreme Court hearing on the challenges to the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 114 Adivasi rights bodies and environmental organisations from across the country on Monday (March 31, 2025) wrote to Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram, demanding that his Ministry defend the 2006 law that was brought in to recognise and protect the forest rights of tribal people and other traditionally forest-dwelling communities.
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 also known as the FRA, was challenged in the Supreme Court in 2008 by Wildlife First, an NGO which called for the eviction of people whose FRA claims had been rejected.
In 2019, the court ordered the eviction, and following widespread protests, the Tribal Affairs Ministry intervened, showing procedural lapses in FRA claims approvals, further saying that many claims had been wrongfully rejected. The court stayed the eviction order and called for detailed data on the rejection of claims.
The letter to Mr. Oram, signed by the rights bodies on Monday, said that the review of rejected claims initiated on orders of the Supreme Court had not been carried out by State governments properly, adding that neither the States nor the Centre had taken the exercise seriously.
“This resulted in either no review or haphazard arbitrary reviews resulting in repetition of rejections. State governments have followed their own mechanisms and processes, with some states even using technology that undermines especially the decision-making authority of the Gram Sabhas, and procedure for determining rights as statutorily required in FRA,” the rights bodies said in their letter.
Citing the case of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, the rights bodies said that the use of satellite imagery to verify FRA claims continues to take place without officials visiting the ground to verify them. “The excessive reliance on satellite imagery, without abiding by the list of evidence provided in FRA, has led to wrongful denials of rightful claims,” they said, adding that even the Tribal Affairs Ministry had flagged possible issues with the use of technology in the implementation of the FRA.
The tribal rights bodies maintained that, unlike what the FRA had envisioned, its implementation was leading to the sidelining of Gram Sabhas, which were meant to initiate and verify FRA claims at the first stage. In Gujarat, they said, despite Gram Sabhas approving 98% of the claims, the Sub-Divisional Level Committee (SDLC) accepted only 62%. This, they said, was “reflecting a misuse and arbitrary exercise of power at the SDLC and District Level Committee (DLC) levels”.
The case is scheduled to be taken up by the Supreme Court again on April 2, and the rights bodies have asked the Tribal Affairs Ministry to defend the law unequivocally in court, saying they did not know if the Ministry intended to show the court the problems with the review of rejections under the FRA. The letter has also been marked to the Chairperson of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes.
According to latest available monthly progress reports on the website of the Tribal Affairs Ministry, a total of over 18.59 lakh claims have been rejected under the FRA, which amounted to about 36.5% of all claims filed till then.
Published – March 31, 2025 11:14 pm IST