Profile: Forest rights victory

For most of India’s indigenous populations, every day is a fight for basic survival and legal and social acceptance.  Their social status—determined at birth by an illegal but deeply entrenched Hindu caste system—is used to deny their basic rights and keeps tens of millions of indigenous families without electricity, running water, schools, access to health care, and little chance to escape crushing poverty.

India’s indigenous people live in a constant fear of having the land on which they and their ancestors have lived taken away. After India’s independence in 1947, the state forest departments engaged in a land-grab, drawing new lines and circles on maps and claiming that all lands within their lines and circles were now state forest department lands.  The indigenous people, and other long-term residents of the forested areas, suddenly became “encroachers.”  As a result, indigenous families have lived under constant harassment and extortion by local authorities and powerful non-indigenous persons who often want to mine the land, or clear it for timber. Attempts to defend traditional land from encroachment almost always end in violence, including brutal beatings.  Police routinely burn crops and exploit the population. 

Out of the more than 80 million indigenous people in India, an estimated 40-50 million of India’s poorest indigenous people live in rural areas under such circumstances.

In the photo to the right:  indigenous people gather to demand that the Indian state give them legal title to the land their ancestors have inhabited for hundreds of years.  Without legal title, they are often treated as “encroachers” on their own land.

Over the past decade, Fund grantees, DISHA (in Gujarat), ASTHA (in Rajasthan) and Yakshi (in Andhra Pradesh), other activists, and politicians have galvanized tens of thousands of India’s indigenous people in a campaign to defend their rights and dignity, and eventually moved the national legislature to pass the landmark “Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights)” Bill, which took effect on January 2, 2007. 

The law was a culmination of a decade-long and persistent struggle. Indigenous rights activists began with local protests, meticulously documented the widespread abuses, tirelessly pressed local and national elected officials, and directly worked with affected communities. “At every stage, tribal leaders and members of tribal organizations were included, hundreds would gather from [tribal areas around the country] . . . to hear the latest developments, to give their views on what should be done next, and to interact with Members of Parliament who came to meet the people gathered in support of the bill,” said Dr. Ginny Shrivastava, director of ASTHA-ASWA and one of India’s most gifted human rights activists. “Indigenous people have fought for their own survival with dignity, and won,” said Shrivastava.

The law protects the rights of India’s forest dwellers to their homeland and livelihoods, and dramatically strengthens the rights of the country’s indigenous peoples (“scheduled tribes” as they are known in India) and other forest dwellers to protect their land against ongoing de-forestation efforts by logging, mining, and other industries. Moreover, it represents an important move towards protecting the environment and righting the wrongs of the past century committed against poor, indigenous peoples across India.  The new law now gives them the right to get legal land ownership papers for their traditional lands.  And the law also stipulates that land ownership papers will be registered in the joint names of the husband and wife – thus giving land rights to tribal women – something they had not had until this landmark law.

In the photo to the right:  indigenous people in the Northeastern “tribal belt” of Gujarat celebrate the landmark victory that enshrined their rights to land and livelihood with a week-long celebration.

The next step for our grantees will be enforcement of the law. Currently, thousands of indigenous families and forest dwellers are being evicted or live under threat of eviction across a rapidly industrializing India. Mass evictions are being fueled by corporations and government officials eager to control their valuable land. While the tribal population now has a clear means for defending their rights, activists predict that vested interests will attempt to derail the law’s implementation and weaken its provisions.  The next battle for the human rights movement is to make sure that the law makes a difference in the lives of the millions of poor people across India.  This involves an investment in educating indigenous communities about the new law and its provisions, conditions, and rules, challenging violations of the forest rights bill, and fostering public campaigns for its enforcement.

Paulomee Mistry, a leader of Fund grantee DISHA, states: “This victory is a major milestone in the people’s movement. It is special because it was led by the section of society (the indigenous community) who were never given their due share in history. Now the challenge for civil society and the Indian government is in implementing this law into reality.”

July 2007