Context: The Ministry of Tribal Affairs is in talks with the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change for funding the management of community forest resources, for which rights have been vested in gram sabhas of tribal communities and other forest-dwellers across the country under the Forest Rights Act (FRA), government officials said.
- Officials of both Ministries met over it recently, and the Tribal Affairs Ministry is also planning to write to the Environment Ministry formally on this matter, a top official told The Hindu, adding that this was necessary to “correct the perception” that the forest bureaucracy was at odds with the goals of community-led forest resource management.
- For the last 20 years, the FRA has recognised the historical rights of Scheduled Tribe communities and other forest-dwellers on the forests they have lived in and around and vested these rights in them through FRA titles for specific sets of rights. Under the FRA, gram sabhas are entitled to include community forest resource rights (CFR) over areas “they have been traditionally protecting, regenerating, conserving and managing for sustainable use”.
- In 2023, the Tribal Affairs Ministry issued guidelines for the management of forests for which CFR rights had already been granted to gram sabhas.
- These guidelines provided for setting up CFR management committees under the title-holding gram sabhas, mandating that conservation and management plans be drawn up by the communities before the Forest Department is called in to align them with the Environment Ministry’s working plan codes. The Union government is now looking to rope in the Environment Ministry to fund the CFR management committees that are being set up under the FRA.
- One senior official said, “The CFRM committees will need resources and help in functioning. They will need the funds to hire officials, prepare plans, and even train their own community’s people in running the day-to-day operations. The idea is to get funding help from the Environment Ministry for this as well.”
- A meeting at the level of Secretaries of both Ministries was held over the last month. “If needed, safeguards can be built in to ensure that the planning of forest conservation and management remains community-led and is not necessarily taken over by the forest department,” one of the officials said.