The State and the Adivasis: The Political Economy of Forest Rights

<strong>NORTH EAST INDIA STUDIES PROGRAMME, DIVERSITY COMMITTEE &amp; CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF DISCRIMINATION AND EXCLUSION, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY</strong> a Presentation on <strong>The State and the Adivasis: The Political Economy of Forest Rights</strong> <strong>Abstract : </strong>PESA 1996 and FRA 2006 are two landmark legislations in independent India that can potentially bring in a radical transformation of the relation between the state and the adivasis. The state-level implementation of these Central Acts, however, is poor. Recent reports on the proposed dilution of FRA are testimony to the fact that its implementation lies at the heart of political economy of growth in India, where state governments are locked in inter-jurisdictional competition for investment and fear losing control over the bait of the instrument of land. In this paper we argue that PESA and FRA upset two emergent political processes relating to forest resources—a) decentralization i.e. the overall drive towards local self-government in the form of formal PRIs, around which democratic politics was slowly reorienting itself and b) national management of forests as it consolidated in the late 1980s in the form of JFM. We locate the current debates on FRA firmly at the confluence of the political economy of growth, politics of decentralization and national commitments to natural resource management and climate change mitigation. SPEAKER <strong>Dr. Kaveri Gill, </strong> Independent Researcher, Delhi CHAIR BY <strong>Prof. Jayati Ghosh </strong> Centre for Economic Studies and Planning Date: <strong>29th September, 2015</strong>