Forest Rights Act After Ten Years

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> SEMINAR SERIES <strong>GEETANJOY SAHU </strong> Assistant Professor, TISS, Mumbai on <strong>Forest Rights Act After Ten Years </strong> The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (hereafter FRA 2006) is going to complete ten years in December 2016. The Act has the potential to recognize the rights of 150 million forest dwelling people of around 1,73,000 villages over a minimum of 40 million hectares (mha) of forest land that they have been managing, using, and interacting with for centuries. The recognition and vesting of rights to forest dwelling communities over a minimum of 40 million hectares of forest land will be more than what hundred plus land reforms legislation of independent India could not able to achieve. In this presentation, I discuss what has been the impact of the FRA 2006 over the last ten years. In doing so, I highlight the gap between the promise and performance so far in the implementation of the Act. This is followed by a critical analysis of emerging challenges in the implementation of Forest Rights Act, especially in the enforcement of community forest resource rights under the Forest Rights Act. Then, I outline the possible areas that need to be strengthened to make the FRA more effective both in the pre and post-rights recognition phase. <strong>24 August, 2016</strong> ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Geetanjoy Sahu is associated with the Centre for Science, Technology &amp; Society, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. His research and teaching interests broadly include environmental policy and governance, analysis of environmental jurisprudence and politics of interaction between state and environmental groups over natural resource management. His work has also involved the development and analysis of forestry, tribal development, and land use pattern in coastal areas. He is the author of Environmental Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court: Litigation, Interpretation and Implementation (Orient BlackSwan, 2013).