India’s Forest Rights Act and indigenous claims to community forest resources: A case study of Lavari, Maharashtra

By Divya Gupta, Meenakshi Sinha, Ashwini Chhatre
World Development Perspectives | September 2022

DOI

doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2022.100449

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Citation

Gupta, Divya., Sinha, Meenakshi., Chhatre, Ashwini. India’s Forest Rights Act and indigenous claims to community forest resources: A case study of Lavari, Maharashtra World Development Perspectives doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2022.100449.

World Development Perspectives, 2022

Abstract

India’s forest-dependent communities constitute one of the most marginalized sections of the country’s population. Despite legal recognition of the rights of forest dwellers over community forest resources through the enactment of Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act in 2006, the communities still struggle in adequately exercising their rights, in fact, in most cases exercising rights is highly unlikely unless the communties are capable of asserting their rights and resisting deprivation from resources they are legally entitled to. This has led to a protracted struggle by forest dependent communities as they demand resettlement of their claims to rights over forest resources. In that context, we draw on evidence from a case study of a village in Maharashtra. Using this case study, we exemplify that statutory recognition of the rights of forest dwellers over community forest resources, when combined with sustained mobilization, allows the community to fully exercise their rights. This can then eventually lead to rewarding outcomes for local communities in the resettlement of their claims to rights over community forest resources in cases of acquisition of forest lands.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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Ashwini Chhatre