Gautam Aredath, Sharachchandra Lele

The Hindustan Times |  September 5, 2024

The Forest Rights Act 2006 (FRA), by recognising the rights of forest-dwelling communities to both access and manage their customary forests, offers a bottom-up vision of forest governance. Eighteen years on, progress in recognising these rights has no doubt been tardy. Only three states — Maharashtra, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh — have recognised such community forest resource rights (CFRRs) in several thousand villages each. Other states with a large potential for such rights have hardly begun. Even in the first three, many villages remain without these and many errors in the rights recognition process need to be corrected. Thus, CFRR recognition remains the focus. Nevertheless, with 12,000-plus villages having received CFRRs, the question of post-rights governance is pressing.