By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, Jan 15 2003 (IPS)

India’s 10 million tribals living in areas termed ‘forest lands’ are living in uncertainty, following a directive by the environment ministry to state governments to evict all ”encroachers”.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests issued the notice to summarily evict all ‘encroachers’ after interpreting an order from India’s Supreme Court that constituted a committee to suggest remedial measures for encroachments on forest lands in 10 of India’s 26 states and nine union territories.

India has 66.3 million hectares, or 19.27 percent of its geographic area under ‘forests’, 11 percent of which constitute dense forests. Experts say that in reality, however, the actual acreage is far lower.

The environment ministry says 1.25 million hectares of these forests have officially been recorded as encroached, but adds that the figure is under-reported.

The Central Empowered Committee confirms that “influential persons with political affiliations not only promote encroachments but also abet in the entire process” of forest encroachment, victimising forest officials who try to prevent them.

But the committee’s own recommendations for stringent eviction have made the tribals an easy and soft target by forest officials, who themselves face penalties for failure to evict these communities.

Living on lands for generations without documented ownership or ‘pattas’ that have either been promised and not given, or lands not been purveyed by the forest department, the ambiguity of India’s ‘forests’ have now made the existence of these simple tribals ‘illegal’.

The tribal association Budakatthu Krishi Kara Sangha (BKS) in the southern state of Karnataka says tribals living adjacent to a Tibetan refugee settlement established in1961 have been there prior to the refugees – and yet been they have also been issued eviction notices

“We are already in a miserable condition, being shunted around all over from previous evictions,” says B S Vittalananchi of the association.” Where do we go?”

“Since independence, where are the forests? Only in areas where tribals are still living,” exclaims an upset J T Rajappa of BKS.

In the forested central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a joint action group of tribal associations recently held a ‘jungle march’ in protest, saying ”we will not vacate our lands, we want an alternative”. NGOs countrywide have endorsed the ‘adivasi’ or tribal protests and have appealed to the Supreme Court to abide by a set of environment ministry circulars issued in 1990.

These allowed encroachments prior to India’s newly formulated Forest Conservation Act of 1980 to be ‘regularised’, allowing tribals legal ownership of their lands not allowed under the old Forest Act of 1927. None of the States have implemented these orders yet.

The National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,(NCSCST) has protested to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, saying that the forest ministry has excluded tribal representation in the Central Empowered Committee, a move that critics argue could be construed as unconstitutional.

“It is regrettable that the Ministry of Environment did not consider this case important enough to even keep the commission informed,” Dr Bizay Shastri, chairman of the NCSCST, wrote the prime minister.

The ministry, in response to widespread protests, moderated its stand in October and told the states to regularise pre-1980 encroachments.

But because numerous tribals have no written records, decisions relating to regularisation have been left to the ‘encroachment committees’ that each state has formed to manage the issue. The matter thus continues to muddle along.

“The police have been co-opted into these state committees, so where will the tribal go to file a local complaint of harassment ?” asks Dr. B D Sharma of Bharat Jan Andolan and former NCSCST commissioner.

It was under his tenure that the six circulars delineating methods of determining pre-1980 tribal landownership, welfare and employment, were worked out.

A cluster of non-government groups – Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala and Tamil Nadu states – have now worked out a method of delineation of physical territory together with oral records of ancestry and holdings endorsed by legal affidavits of neighbours and the president of the ‘gram sabha’, or official village administration set up under Indian laws.

Whether these NGO-initiated steps will be incorporated by the state ‘encroachment committees’ is not clear.

Activists are also critical of the wildlife NGO representation within the Central Empowered Committee that endorsed evictions, saying India’s emerging ‘elite environmentalism’ does not take its disadvantaged poor into account.

“This western wilderness concept is nothing but neocolonial environmentalism that brushes aside India’s cultural history. We need to understand the real situation on the ground,” say Pradeep Prabhu and Sanjay Hiremath of National Committee for the Protection of Natural Resources.

In this ambiguous situation, powerful, wealthy encroachers flourish. Other than one case of conviction of a member of Karnataka’s state legislature, B L Shankar, who has until Jan. 31 this year to surrender the lands he encroached into, no other wealthy illegal occupant has been brought to justice.

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