Santosh Mahapatra

Writ Petition number 202 of 1995; Godavarman v the Union of India and others. This is the ‘forest case’ being heard in Supreme Court for the past seven years. With more than 800 interlocutory applications (ias) filed, the case will dictate the fate of India’s forests and an estimated 10 million indigenous tribal people who live in and off the forest. It has already produced several dramatic interim orders, the latest being in May 2002, when some state governments — Assam and Maharashtra, in particular — launched eviction drives against encroachers on forestland (see box: Assam: It ended...).

The eviction drive was in response to a circular sent by the Union ministry of environment and forests (mef), dated May 3, 2002, to all states and Union territories (forest is on the concurrent list, and hence both the Centre and the state governments have a say). It set a totally unrealistic deadline of September 30, 2002, to remove all encroachments from forests, mentioning that the Supreme Court had expressed concern over the issue. The five-member Central Empowered Committee (cec) set up by the court recommended measures several times stronger than those in the mef circular.

The panicky reaction of some state governments was as much due to the circular, if not more, as the fear of action by the Supreme Court.

The response was quixotic. Assam went on an eviction drive in the first week of May. The state’s forest department used elephants to raze down hutments and homesteads on land recorded as forest.

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The second wave began in Maharashtra, where tribal families faced evictions from farms with standing crops. Scores of houses were destroyed, hundreds were rendered homeless. In a country where it is difficult to ascertain who is an encroacher on whose land and at what time, there was a public outcry.

In several other states, the level of exploitation of people classified as forest encroachers increased manifold. There were reports that bribes to forest officials rose in Orissa. In Andhra Pradesh, Sakti, an organisation working for tribal people, approached the high court and obtained a stay on the state forest department’s eviction notices to several ‘encroachers’. It pleaded with the court to direct the state government to grant land rights and issue pattas for more than 31,000 hectares of land in reserve forests, which has been cultivated by tribals since before 1980. Across the country, civil society groups organised meetings and protests. The eviction drives came to a halt due to many reasons: rainy season and political compulsions (several states face elections in 2003).

How did a case, which began as an effort to curtail logging in the forests of the Nilgiris, lead to action against tribal people who have been wronged, historically, by the conflicting interests of government departments and arbitrary declaration of their ancestral lands as state-owned ‘forests’? People, whose lands have been usurped but haven’t been compensated? Clearly, the government had bungled yet again.

1995: The beginning
T N Godavarman Thirumalpad, a resident of Nilgiri, had filed a public interest petition to prevent logging in forests that formerly belonged to his family. The court took up the matter as its own. A number of orders followed, not the least dramatic of which was a ban on the felling of trees in forests (see: ‘Logjam’, Down To Earth, March 15, 2002). The ban was widely viewed as the only measure possible to prevent rapid felling of trees due to the government-timber lobby nexus especially in India’s Northeast, which was losing 31,700 hectares of forest every year, according to the mef. But it caused hardship to saw mill owners, those employed in timber-based activities and small private forest owners.

So when did encroachment become an issue? The developments began in August 1999 following a problem facing the indigenous people and their forests in islands of the Bay of Bengal. Concerned at the sad state of the Onge tribe, indigenous to the Little Andamans, and the destruction by the administration of the rich forests they depend on, three non-governmental organisations approached the circuit bench of the Calcutta High Court at Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The organisations were the Society for Andaman & Nicobar Ecology (sane) in Port Blair, the Bombay Natural History Society in Mumbai, and Kalpvriksh in Pune. They also filed an interlocutory application (number 502) in the Godavarman case in October 1999. They requested for:

• a ban on felling trees in the Little Andamans

• removal of all encroachments from the tribal reserve

• a ban on all mining or any other non-forest activities in the Little Andamans; and

• restrictions on construction of any road within the tribal reserve or within a radius of half a kilometre.

Two years later, in October 2001, the court passed an interim order prohibited cutting of any naturally grown trees. On November 23, 2001 Harish Salve, the amicus curiae (‘friend of the court’, a lawyer appointed by the court in public interest) filed intervention petition number 703 in the Andamans application number 502. Based on the recommendations of the cec report, he said “one of the major reasons for decimation of the forests is the growing extent of encroachments”. Describing the Andamans as an eco-sensitive region, he called attention to encroachments in West Bengal (in the Sunderbans), Karnataka (Western Ghats), Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (Aravalli and Satpura region), Tamil Nadu (the Nilgiris) and Assam. The state governments, Salve submitted, were allowing further encroachments of forest in contravention of the Supreme Court’s order of December 12, 1996, which restrained state governments from permitting non-forest uses of forests.