On August 31, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) sent an office memorandum to the Ministry of Power stating that the Forest Rights Act 2006 has “no provision for obtaining” gram sabha consent for forest clearance.
The Committee also recommended that compliance with the Forest Rights Act be completed “at the pre-feasibility stage to prevent delays at the Stage-II clearance stage”, and asked the Ministry of Power to pursue the matter with the MoTA and Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC).
This was the context of MoTA’s response, which is in defiance of its constitutional responsibility to guard the Forest Rights Act. The same Rules also divested the MoEFCC of any authority over such subject matters. When the government notified the FRA Rules in 2008, the MoEFCC considered what the Forest Rights Act would entail. The MoEFCC had repeated this position in a 2020 report .
In 2006, the government had carved out “all matters, including legislation, relating to the rights of forest dwelling schedule tribes on forest lands” from the subject of forests and allotted them to the MoTA by amending the Government of India (Allocation of Business) Rules 1961, bringing the MoEFCC’s monopoly on forests to a close. Through a 2009 report , it affirmed that “the Schedule Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006” — which is the full name of the Act — “assigned rights to protect around 40 million hectares of community forest resources to village level democratic institutions. The fine tuning of other forest-related legislations is needed with respect to the said Act. The MoEFCC tried to replace the National Forest Policy 1988 — which recognised “the symbiotic relationship between the tribal people and forests” — with a draft National Forest Policy in 2018. MoTA said the draft “disregarded the traditional custodians and conservatives of the forests” and gave “thrust to increased privatisation, industrialization and diversion of forest resources for commercialisation”.
The very next year, the Prime Minister’s Office overruled MoTA’s objections, to exempting projects under five categories of projects, from obtaining gram sabhas’ consent. The Office also asked the MoEFCC to draft revised guidelines to let district collectors to clear forest diversion. In effect, project proponents would have to seek gram sabhas’ consent after they had already committed funds for the project. MoTA opposed this instantly.
The MoTA insisted this was “illegal” and would encroach on “the jurisdiction of the judiciary and the legislature”. Then, in 2019, the MoEFCC said proposals to divert forests need not comply with the Forest Rights Act for “in-principle” stage-I approval and that such compliance is only required for the final approval.
