Situating Law: Adivasi Rights and the Political Economy of Environment and Development in India (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
Control of land is a source of contention among indigenous peoples, governments, conservationists and extractive industries. Forests are crucial to the existence and survival of tribal and pastoralist populations in India. The competition for control of land, coupled with a historical lack of rights of indigenous peoples, has resulted in land dispossession and impoverishment. To address this, the Indian Government passed the Forest Rights Act in 2006. Using empirical evidence from India, I critically examine, from a socio-legal perspective, the challenges of implementing the Forest Rights Act. The Act itself, while pushing the new ‘inclusion’ paradigm within conservation thinking, has been a shock to bureaucratic structures in India such as the Forest Department, which sees its role as fighting the ‘encroachment’ of tribal communities, and whose attitudes towards the community ranges from apathetic to openly hostile. In violation of human rights, state and central governments are i...
CONSERVATION-A CONTESTED STORY: THE STATE AND THE KADAR ADIVASIS, INDIA
LEAD Law Environment and Development Journal VOLUME 15/0, 2019
The Adivasis’ ownership rights over resources are intertwined with the history of managing, conserving and governing the Indian forest by the colonial and post-colonial State. This history has been divided into three different phases in this paper. In the first phase, the forestry was merely understood in terms of managing the forest and enforcement of the colonial rules and regulations. This model was primarily based on the commercial and economic significance of the forest. In the second phase, there was a shift from management to conservation of the forest. In both these stages, rights of the Adivasis over resources were curtailed. In the third phase, the forestry was turned to forest governance and the Adivasi rights started getting recognised in a greater degree compared to the past. In this historical context, this paper explores the impact of State-led forest management in India on the cultural, social and economic life of the local community through an empirical analysis of the Kadar Adivasi community in Kerala, India. Kadar community is one of the severely marginalised groups due to the State’s various development and conservation programmes. This paper unravels the various ways in which post-colonial laws in India have consistently failed to offer any legal protection and eventually marginalised the locality specific knowledge on conservation developed by the indigenous people through their cultural institutions, which have been informed by their lived experience in the forest areas over a long period of time. The paper concludes by delineating the complex interface between conservation practices of the Kadar Adivasis and the State initiated policies and programmes for conserving the forest and its resources.
Where are Tribals in Their Development? A Century of Indian Forest Legislations
Historically, forest resources were being accessed and utilized predominantly by the forest dwelling tribal communities (FDTCs), but during the colonial regime and later by the State's interventions, accessibility and ownership on forests were being regularized and controlled through forest legislations. Over the century, forest acts and policies have claimed to conserve and provide the equitable and justifiable distribution of forest resources among the human populace. Ironically, the State has been using its eminent domain power to exclude FDTCs from their rights to livelihood and thereby from social equity and justice. In the pre-and post-independence periods, focus moved from the commercialization of forest resources to communities' livelihood and participation in the forest governance. Laws are inherently centralized both at the planning and implementation levels and, therefore, hardly there is any scope for principles like social equity and justice for the local communities. This article attempts to address the trends in the forest policies and acts through a critical review and also by analyzing empirical studies on its formulation. In doing so, it will explore the major changes in the Indian forest policies and their relationship with the rights and livelihood of FDTCs.
Journal of the Anthropological Survey of India, 2022
The book is composed of seven chapters with glossary of the local terms, 11 pages of bibliographic content and 11 pages of index. The introductory chapter defined the nature and character of European countries generally and Great Britain particularly. There were two broad themes of debate in the context of the idea of conservation of forest and wildlife. The first debate was based on the pre-colonial equilibrium between nature and society. The second debate illustrated the character of colonial Forest policies (commercialisation or conservation). For better understanding, the author divided the India's Environmental History into six phases, namely Pre-colonial phase 1790s (equilibrium between society and natural resources), Pre-forest Act 1790s-1870s (systematic exploitation of nature), Post-forest Act 1870s-1940s (implementation of Indian Forest Act 1878 and a period of debate between conservation and commercialisation), Post-independence phase-until the 1980s (development during Fifth Five year plan), Post-forest Conservation Act-until 2006 (more infrastructure more extraction of Forest) and Vote bank politics era 2006 onwards (implementation of TSP, restoration of Forest Rights Act 2006). The second chapter 'Exploitation of Forests, 1793-1882' was divided into two categories. The first part of the chapter discusses the tribal's traditional method of agriculture (shifting cultivation and settled cultivation) and production for domestic consumption (pre-1793). The author argued that the tribals were the conservator of resources due to their non-commercialised nature of forest resources. The second part had defined the commercialised agenda of the Colonial government from 1792 to 1882. The author here provided the statistical analysis of extraction of timber and sandalwood, plantation of coffee and tea, Britishowned Iron making and sugar boiling industry and introduction of railways in Madras Presidency which fulfilled their commercialised nature to larger extent. The third chapter 'Conservation or Commercialisation, 1882-1947' defined the intention of colonial government with the implementation of Madras Forest Act 1882 which came into force in 1883. The chapter begins with a question of whether the British government was in favour of Conservation or Commercialisation? The Forest Act restricted the lifestyles of tribals, namely
The International Journal of Human Rights, 2021
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) seeks to address the deeply entrenched inequalities that affect the world's peasants and other rural working people. UNDROP's mandate intersects with the goals of land rights and food sovereignty, sustainable development, and socially just climate mitigation and adaptation. We analyse the policy and legal challenges of protecting the rights of India's indigenous Adivasi peasants, whose identities and life-worlds cut across the distinctions that the international community makes between indigenous peoples that are the focus of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and peasants who are at the center of the goals of UNDROP. The rights that India's Adivasis enjoy are comparable to those contained in the UNDROP, have been the subject of longstanding social mobilizations, and a relatively new Act of India's Parliament. However, these rights are also contested by powerful actors in the executive and judiciary branches of government as well as some of the most influential nature conservation groups in India. This investigation puts to test the commonly made arguments about the strengths of India's democratic institutions, including the judicial activism of the Supreme Court of India, which is often referred to as an activist court. In conclusion, we offer five key insights to inform the ongoing efforts of human rights advocates and practitioners to ensure the effective protection of the rights enshrined within UNDROP.
Historical Injustice against indigenous people and forest dwellers of India
2014
The preamble of The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (hereinafter referred to as the Forest Rights Act or FRA) states that the Act was passed to undo the “historical injustice” committed against the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have been residing in the forests for centuries, but whose rights could not be recorded. The question that requires to be answered is whether FRA has succeeded in undoing historic injustice to the schedules tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. This article will talk about the various Constitutional provisions safeguarding the rights of the tribes, the role of indigenous people in the Indian sub continent, the traditional knowledge of the tribal community and why the FRA had to be framed.
Fate of the Forest: Conservation and Tribal Rights
Economic and Political Weekly, 1994
The recent circulation of a draft Forest Act has once again brought into question the future of India's forests. The draft Act proposes to take a strongly conservationist stand against environmental degradation by severely restricting people's rights to the forest. How environmentally successful and socially just will such a policy be? This essay examines the experience of adivasis in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh, whose livelihood derives from their use of the forest, and who are held responsible by the state for destroying the forest. The state's persistent efforts to deny adivasi rights to the forest has resulted in an ongoing conflict that today constitutes the biggest obstacle to forest conservation. The author analyses the relationships between adivasis, the state and the forest to argue that the future of India's forests is inseparable from the future of India's adivasis. Forest conservation is possible only if people's rights are recognised and established within a larger programme of tribal development.
Tribes and Forest: A critical appraisal of the tribal forest right in India
TIJ's Research Journal of Social Science & Management - RJSSM, 2016
India is land of nearly 10.4 million tribes which constitutes 8.6% of its total population and spread over 15% of its geographical area. Tribe has very close relation with the forest and their life and sustenance is harmonized with available forest resources. The ongoing pursuit for economic development and market pressure on government have forced policy-makers to convert forest land into large corporations which again push away the indigenous people from their soils. Since the colonial period the forest policies jeopardized the tribal’s rights over the forest and ignored their voices during framing the laws. In the colonial period the legal and policy instruments transferred the right over forests from communities’ hand to government’s hand. The post colonial law has provided a dignified status to tribals but it will not be able to resolve tribal people’s human rights and livelihood issues without similar or greater advancement in law and administration in other areas such as land...
Tribal Land: Development vs. Traditional Rights of Adivasis
The issues considered in this paper represent the intersection of state and privately owned developmental programmes, and the people who often end up with the shorter end of the stick at the cost of this development. Since liberalization in the 90's, the socioeconomic paradigm of neo-liberal development in India has had unavoidable implications for tribals, farmers and other communities of socioeconomically underprivileged sections of Indian society. The 1994 rehabilitation policy draft of the Government of India begins by stating that with the 1991 economic policy Indian as well as foreign private investment would require more land than in the past and that much of it would be in the resource rich tribal areas 1. The intrusion of the said paradigm into the lives of these communities has led to a quagmire of both conceptual and real biases, based on the myopic understanding of 'development' within the centrally enforced paradigm. It has often been the case that underprivileged communities become underprivileged due to this intrusion in the first place. As a result, legislative frameworks safeguarding their interests end up being reactive, rather than proactive. The matter's complexity arises from the fact that it is very often state policies that inflict the most damage and at the same time, we look to state legislation to protect the rights of underprivileged communities in the face of unprecedented industrial and economic growth. Specifically, this paper will compare legislative and constitutional provisions, state initiatives with cases that reveal the impact of these provisions. The scope of the issues discussed in this paper will pertain to a broad range of tribal issues. The common feature amongst them in the scope of this paper is the centrality of land, whether it is displacement or peoples, acquisition of forest and agricultural land or the labelling of tribals as 'encroachers' upon state property. Quintessentially, these considerations will reflect on the idea of 'public space' for tribals and poor peasants.