Overcoming Challenges: Addressing Implementation Hurdles of the Forest Rights Act

The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 – commonly known as the Forest Rights Act or FRA – was passed to correct a deep-rooted historical injustice. For generations, millions of adivasis and other forest-dwelling communities had lived in and depended on India’s forests, but their rights over these lands were never formally recognized. The FRA set out to change that by granting both individual and community rights over forest land and resources. Yet nearly two decades since the law came into force, the gap between what it promises and what forest dwellers actually receive on the ground remains wide – and troubling.

What the law set out to do
The awareness gap: rights people don’t know they have
Bureaucratic bottlenecks and claim rejections
Technical grounds used to deny valid claims
Officials demanding evidence the law does not require
The forest department’s resistance to power-sharing
Community participation: limited and unequal
Exclusion of non-tribal forest dwellers
Special challenges in the Northeast
The threat from legislative changes
What needs to change

What the law set out to do

The FRA recognizes five broad categories of rights: individual rights to cultivate and inhabit forest land, community rights over non-timber forest produce, community forest resource rights (which empower gram sabhas to protect and manage forests), habitat rights for particularly vulnerable tribal groups, and cultural or religious rights over sacred sites. Together, these rights were intended to shift the governance of over 40 million hectares of community forest resources from the state Forest Department to forest-dwelling communities through their gram sabhas – village-level democratic assemblies that function as the primary decision-making body under the Act.

On paper, this was a landmark shift toward decentralized, community-led conservation. In practice, a cluster of deeply entrenched problems has prevented the Act from realizing its full potential.

The awareness gap: rights people don’t know they have

Research from The India Forum identifies the lack of awareness among forest dwellers as one of the most fundamental barriers to FRA implementation. Many communities remain unaware that a law exists which formally recognizes their rights – let alone the specific procedures for claiming those rights. This is compounded by language barriers, since legal documents and official processes are typically conducted in languages that tribal communities may not speak or read fluently.

Progress has been seen only in pockets – certain districts in Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha – where active local leadership and sustained efforts by civil society organizations have built awareness and momentum. Outside these islands of success, the awareness gap remains stark. The problem feeds on itself: a community that does not know its rights cannot file a claim, and a claim that is never filed is never recognized.

Bureaucratic bottlenecks and claim rejections

Even when communities do file claims, they face a multi-layered administrative process that has become a significant bottleneck. Under the FRA, a claim travels from the gram sabha to the Forest Rights Committee, then to the Sub-Divisional Level Committee (SDLC), and finally to the District Level Committee (DLC). Each stage involves verification, and each stage has become a point of delay or rejection.

Technical grounds used to deny valid claims

Down to Earth has documented how claims are frequently rejected on technical pretexts – such as the absence of satellite imagery or GPS mapping – even though Rule 12A of the FRA clearly specifies that these technologies are supplementary evidence, not substitutes for community testimony. Ground-level committees, often dominated by forest and revenue department officials, have routinely weaponized these technicalities to deny legitimate claims, effectively sidelining the gram sabha’s own evidence.

Officials demanding evidence the law does not require

The Economic and Political Weekly documented cases in Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur district where SDLCs demanded that Scheduled Tribe claimants prove three generations of residency – a condition that simply does not apply to them under Section 2(c) of the FRA. Similarly, officials have sent claims back to gram sabhas citing procedural objections that contradict the Act’s own rules. This pattern – demanding what the law does not require while ignoring what it does – points to a systemic problem of bureaucratic resistance, not mere administrative error.

At the heart of many implementation failures is an institutional conflict. The FRA fundamentally requires that the Forest Department relinquish its historically colonial control over forests and share that authority with gram sabhas. Unsurprisingly, this has generated considerable resistance.

A study published in Lex Localis found that state Forest Departments engage in procedural sabotage and bureaucratic inertia to dilute the gram sabha’s legally mandated authority. In states like Odisha, the forest department has continued controlling the lucrative trade in Kendu leaves – a right that legally belongs to gram sabhas under the FRA – by issuing transit permits to its own contractors instead. Mongabay reported that in some villages, it took over a decade of persistent effort for communities to have their community forest resource rights finally validated.

Community participation: limited and unequal

The FRA places the gram sabha at the center of the rights recognition process – it is the gram sabha that receives claims, conducts verification, and forwards approved claims up the administrative chain. However, across most of India, gram sabhas lack the institutional capacity to perform these functions effectively. A 2024 fact-finding report by Delhi-based NGO Call for Justice, chaired by retired High Court judge S.N. Dhingra, found that gram sabhas, Forest Rights Committees, and approval committees across five surveyed states “generally lack the capacity to implement the FRA,” leading to an ad hoc and inconsistent process for rights recognition.

Exclusion of non-tribal forest dwellers

The same report found that non-Scheduled Tribe forest dwellers – who are also entitled to rights under the Act as “other traditional forest dwellers” – have found almost no representation in the committees that approve claims. Community forest rights have lagged far behind individual forest rights claims in recognition rates, and in areas proposed for mining or industrial projects, officials have been found to deliberately withhold community forest rights declarations so as to ease the process of diverting that land for non-forest purposes.

Special challenges in the Northeast

The northeastern states present a unique challenge. Communities in Assam and other northeastern states that practice jhum (shifting cultivation), which involves moving to different patches of land every few years, struggle to meet the Act’s evidentiary requirements, which are designed around sedentary occupancy. The fact-finding report recommended that jhum cultivation be explicitly recognized as a customary practice under the FRA, since the current framework effectively excludes these communities from claiming the rights they should be entitled to.

The threat from legislative changes

Beyond implementation failures, the FRA now faces structural challenges from changes to related laws. The Forest Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2023 has drawn criticism for narrowing the definition of “forest” and reducing the circumstances under which gram sabha consent is mandatory for forest diversion. Critics argue that these amendments, combined with the MoEFCC’s 2023 Community Forest Resource guidelines that replaced an older, gram sabha-empowering 2015 framework, collectively shift decision-making power back toward the Forest Department – undoing the decentralization the FRA was designed to achieve.

Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy notes that even in high-performing states like Maharashtra and Odisha, ensuring transparency and robust monitoring of community forest resource management has remained a persistent struggle. Coordinated efforts between the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change – which often pull in opposite directions – are essential to ensuring FRA is implemented in both letter and spirit.

What needs to change

The path forward involves action at several levels. Awareness programs, particularly through Tribal Research Institutions and state-level training platforms, need to reach communities in their own languages and explain both their rights and the procedures for claiming them. The composition of SDLCs and DLCs must be reformed to prevent forest department officials from holding unchallenged decision-making authority – independent monitors and civil society representatives should be included. Grievance redressal mechanisms are needed for claims that remain unresolved for extended periods. And as the India Forum analysis points out, the Forest Department itself needs to shift its institutional outlook: from seeing forest communities as threats to conservation to treating their well-being as integral to it.

Recognizing FRA’s full promise also means ensuring that rights granted on paper translate into real, exercisable rights on the ground – including control over forest produce, access to markets, and the authority to manage community forests without departmental interference. Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district, where gram sabhas have leveraged community forest resource rights to generate income and achieve local self-development, offers a replicable model – but only if the political will exists to make the conditions that enabled Gadchiroli’s success available to the rest of India’s forest communities.

What do you think? Given that gram sabhas are legally the most empowered bodies under the FRA, why do you think bureaucratic control over forests continues to override community authority in most states? And if you were designing a reform to make the FRA’s implementation more effective, what would be the single most important change you would make?

References

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Table of Contents

What the law set out to do 🔗

The awareness gap: rights people don’t know they have 🔗

Bureaucratic bottlenecks and claim rejections 🔗

Technical grounds used to deny valid claims 🔗

Officials demanding evidence the law does not require 🔗

The forest department’s resistance to power-sharing 🔗

Community participation: limited and unequal 🔗

Exclusion of non-tribal forest dwellers 🔗

Special challenges in the Northeast 🔗

The threat from legislative changes 🔗

What needs to change 🔗