Never Just About Rights: 20 years of The Forest Rights Act (FRA) : Part-2

Part I traced the colonial forest regime, the movement that produced the FRA, the reduction of rights to implementation statistics, and the new enclosures emerging through development and ‘green’ conservation. Part II asks what happens when Gram Sabhas actually try to govern forests.

What happened when villages tried to govern

North Bengal is useful here precisely because the story is untidy. The forest movement that grew there from the late 1990s did not begin with the FRA; the law did not yet exist. Forest villagers were struggling against a much older order in which their settlements, cultivation and adjoining forests remained legally and administratively subordinate to the Forest Department.

From begar to the claim to self-government

The term ‘forest village’ can be misleading. These were not, in origin, ordinary villages placed inside forests. Under colonial scientific forestry, forest and taungya villages were labour institutions. Under service-jaigir and taungya arrangements, households received small plots, residence and limited forest concessions in exchange for compulsory labour for the Forest Department. Their right to remain was tied to service. Independence changed the personnel of rule far more quickly than it changed this relationship. Begar — compulsory unpaid labour — continued in parts of North Bengal well into the postcolonial period.

The anti-begar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was the first major rupture. Villagers stopped plantation work, demanded wages and resisted eviction; in several places they also challenged clear-felling and contractor-controlled forestry. The movement forced the state to introduce wage standards and to place some limits on arbitrary evictions. But it did not transfer authority over forests. The department still decided how forests would be worked, felled, planted and protected.

The terms of control changed again from the 1980s. Commercial forestry contracted, protected areas expanded and Joint Forest Management arrived. People who had once been treated as a captive labour force were increasingly described as pressures on wildlife or as beneficiaries of eco-development. JFM offered conditional benefits but left working plans, felling, plantations and conservation under departmental control. By the end of the century, therefore, the movement had begun to shift from a demand for work and wages towards secure habitation, the conversion of forest villages, customary use, and democratic authority over forests. Local formations in North Bengal linked this shift to the national forest-rights mobilisation.

A people’s implementation

When the FRA was enacted in 2006, villagers acquired a new political vocabulary: Community Forest Resource (CFR), Gram Sabha authority, the right to protect and manage. Yet the official implementation in West Bengal quickly reproduced older administrative habits. Forest Rights Committees were often constituted above the village level; officials and government-controlled bodies entered the process; arbitrary deadlines were imposed; community evidence was disregarded; and CFR claims were left unrecognised. Implementation became a struggle over who had the authority to interpret the Act.

Many villages did not wait indefinitely for the bureaucracy. What movement activists called a “people’s implementation” began. Gram Sabhas mapped customary territories, filed CFR claims, erected signboards, kept records and organised patrols. In Chilapata and adjoining forests, some stopped clear-felling and challenged the unauthorised removal of timber, sand and boulders. By 2011, nearly 200 forest villages across three districts had reportedly submitted CFR claims; eight Chilapata villages together claimed about 2,985 hectares[6]. The demand was no longer confined to recognition. Communities were to exercise the authority that the Act said had already vested in them.

This is where the rather abstract word ‘commons’ begins to acquire meaning. A commons is not created because a government issues a title saying ‘community forest’. It comes into existence when people act collectively to maintain something they share: when rules are negotiated and observed, when someone gives up a day’s wage to patrol a forest, when disputes over use are settled, and when a person who could profit privately from felling a tree accepts that the tree is not simply his to sell.\

In some villages the Gram Sabha did more than patrol. It made rules, kept accounts, decided how fallen or seized timber would be used and confronted contractors, poachers and sometimes Forest Department coupe operations. Women were often central to these conflicts because their everyday work involved fuelwood, fodder, and forest food collection, as well as fishing and cultivation. Mapping boundaries, keeping records, arguing over rules and reading the Act back to officials also produced political knowledge. Commoning was not merely the assertion that ‘this is our forest’; it was the practice of learning how to govern it.

The FRA mattered enormously. Officials could no longer dismiss villagers quite so easily as illegal occupants; a Gram Sabha confronting a forest officer could cite an Act of Parliament. But the law did not patrol the forest, attend meetings, settle conflicts or compensate a villager for a day’s wage lost to collective work. Nor did it make the Forest Department disappear. JFM structures returned, development funds could reward compliant groups, contractors and party networks entered village politics, and officials found new ways of dealing with selected leaders rather than Gram Sabhas.

There were internal limits too. Patrolling depended on unpaid time and weakened when livelihood pressures intensified. Money could create factions. Local leaders could become unaccountable. Institutions that were democratic at the height of mobilisation could dry up when movements receded. That brings us to an uncomfortable but necessary question.

Is ‘the community’ always democratic?

No. We did not struggle against the bureaucratic myth that forest dwellers were encroachers to replace it with another myth — that every community is naturally democratic, egalitarian and ecologically wise. Villages contain power. Caste does not stop at the forest boundary. Neither does patriarchy. Neither does class. A comparatively wealthy household with cattle may see a grazing commons differently from a landless family. A trader may see timber where another person sees fuelwood, food and shade. Men and women may use the same forest in entirely different ways. Party politics, migration, consumer goods and commercial markets do not wait outside the village for permission to enter.

This is why transferring authority from ‘state’ to ‘community’ cannot by itself reproduce a commons. Umar Khalid’s recent book Fractured Communities is useful here because it refuses to treat Adivasi society as a homogeneous, undivided entity. Communities change internally; the state and capital do not act only from outside, but can also reproduce their relationships within village life.

Anyone who has worked with forest movements knows this in practice. A Gram Sabha can resist a mining company; a local elite can also capture it. A community can conserve a forest; it can also decide what to sell. Neither possibility proves that state forestry is preferable. It tells us something harder: democratic control is not a fixed legal category but a political process. Commons survive through communing — the repeated work of making, using, defending and remaking what is shared.

Law is unstable ground.

There is another complication: law itself does not speak in one voice. In the 2013 Niyamgiri case, the Supreme Court enabled Gram Sabhas to determine religious, cultural and community claims; the villages rejected mining. In Wildlife First in 2019, however, the Court ordered the eviction of people whose FRA claims had been rejected, before staying that direction while the rejection process was scrutinised. And in A John Kennedy v State of Tamil Nadu in 2026, directions for the time-bound removal of ‘encroachments’ from protected areas did not require prior determination of possible FRA claims [7].

Within the same legal world, then, the FRA can become a powerful weapon in the hands of a Gram Sabha, a rejected claim can become the prelude to threatened eviction, or the Act can disappear from the very framework in which forest residents’ futures are being decided. Ministries, too, do not speak with one voice. These institutional fractures create openings — Niyamgiri is a major example — but they also consume political energy. If movements must repeatedly reopen claims, correct records, and defend the 2006 legal settlement from dilution, when do they get to extend the politics of autonomy that produced the Act in the first place?

So what is the FRA for?

None of this is an argument against the Forest Rights Act. Quite the opposite. It remains, perhaps, the most democratic forest legislation independent India has enacted. Without it, millions of people would be far more vulnerable to eviction and administrative violence. It gave political and legal force to claims the forest bureaucracy had denied for generations and opened doors that had previously been closed.

But the Act’s biggest promise lies not simply in titles. It lies in authority: Community Forest Resources, habitat rights, conversion of forest villages, the powers of the Gram Sabha, and the recognition that people living in forests are not merely beneficiaries of state schemes but political actors capable of governing landscapes. Reduce the FRA to implementation and much of this politics disappears.

If an official fails to process a claim, implementation has failed. But what do we call it when the claim is recognised, and the forest is then handed over to an industrialist for mining? When a Gram Sabha has a CFR title but a JFM committee still controls management funds? When conservation policy pushes a village towards relocation? When a carbon or plantation project designed elsewhere determines the future of a village forest? These are not implementation gaps. They are conflicts over power.

That distinction matters twenty years after the FRA. The objective was never simply to enact a piece of legislation; it was to change social and political relations inside forests. Sometimes law helps. Sometimes the same state that recognises a right undermines it through another law, policy, project or institution. And sometimes the danger comes through capital, markets, party networks, local elites and inequalities reproduced within communities themselves. There will therefore be no final legal settlement of the forest question.

Self-government has to be learned.

A more recent experiment in North Bengal is also important in this context. Movement work has extended into women-led learning centres across 35 Gram Sabhas [8]. These are not government training camps nor are they classes in which outside experts arrive to explain the law. They are spaces where people begin from their own experiences of forests, the Gram Sabha, and movements’ histories, and learn together — closer to a Freirean pedagogy of dialogue than to instruction from above.

The discussions range across new forms of enclosure, where the FRA helps and where it fails, what a Gram Sabha can and cannot do, gendered differences in forest use, the accumulation of power inside villages, and what commoning might mean in practice. The point is not simply to produce better-informed rights claimants. It is to build the capacity to decide, argue, demand accounts, recognise internal inequalities and create new leadership. Self-government, in this sense, is not another benefit devolved by the state. It is a social capacity learned through practice.

Law can open space for that work; it cannot perform it. A title does not create a commons, and the term “Gram Sabha’ in a statute does not by itself create democracy. Gram Sabhas have to be made and remade, democratised internally and defended externally. That continuing social labour is commoning.

An opening, not the destination

The FRA therefore remains both a weapon and an opening. State recognition is not autonomy, and statutory gains do not complete the struggle. The Act must be used when it protects people from eviction and gives Gram Sabhas room to act; be defended against other laws and policies that authorise dispossession; and be exceeded politically where rights alone cannot secure the conditions of common life.

The commons will survive, because people keep producing them — through institutions, organising, argument, resistance, conservation, struggles over inequalities within communities, and the everyday labour of sharing a landscape. The Forest Rights Act gives that process unusually strong legal ground. How far people can travel from that ground will not be decided by statutory language alone. Organised communities will decide it.

Endnotes and source links

1. For the historical background to the 2002 eviction crisis and the institutional history that preceded the FRA, see Springate-Baginski et al., Redressing ‘Historical Injustice’ through the Indian Forest Rights Act 2006. The text of the FRA, including Parliament’s acknowledgement of ‘historical injustice’, is available through the Ministry of Tribal Affairs.

2. Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India, FRA Monthly Progress Report, March 2026, and the Ministry’s FRA portal.

3. Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Lok Sabha Starred Question No. 333, answered 24 March 2025. The official figure for forest land approved for diversion during 2014–15 to 2023–24 is 173,396.87 hectares.

4. The NTCA’s STRIDES 2026 assessment records 97,786 families remaining in 742 villages within critical tiger habitats.

5. The Green Credit Programme is administered by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and ICFRE. The government confirmed in March 2026 that the tree-plantation methodology had been revised on 29 August 2025.

6. On North Bengal’s ‘people’s implementation’, CFR claims and Gram Sabha conservation, see G U, Nishok, Tom Lazlo Guha and Meenal Tatpati (2018), Community Based Conservation amidst Conflict in the Dooars Region of North Bengal; and Sourish Jha (2010), ‘Process Betrays the Spirit’ and ‘The Struggle for Democratizing Forests’.

7. Orissa Mining Corporation v Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013); Wildlife First v Ministry of Forest and Environment (2019); A John Kennedy and Others v State of Tamil Nadu and Others (2026), 2026 INSC 605.

8. The account of women-led learning centres in 35 Gram Sabhas draws on the author’s field observations in 2025–26 and the longer EPW paper, Reproducing the Commons: Beyond the Juridical Imagination of the Forest Rights Act.

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Photo: Anitesh Chakraborty