After many years of stonewalling, the Madhya Pradesh (MP) government seems to have seriously taken up the issue of recognising Community Forest Resource Rights (CFRR) under the Forest Rights Act (FRA). The publication of the FRA manual and a list of potential villages in April 2025, the training of all district-level committees in May, the creation of a pool of state-level master trainers and the recent circular aiming to reach 10 per cent recognition by December together suggest a degree of seriousness and urgency regarding community rights that has been missing for the previous 15 years.
No doubt, in the complicated and contested arena of forests in India, any initiative to radically change the contours of governance is bound to be challenging. Not surprisingly, this initiative has sparked unease within the MP Forest Department (FD). In that context, it is heartening to see that at least some forest officials are engaging with the question of how this should be done. In his recent article (16 October 2025) in Down To Earth, Pradeep Mishra, a serving forest officer from MP, raises important questions regarding the government’s haste to recognise CFRRs, suggesting that even a 10 per cent goal is too much too soon. Seeking clarity regarding the verification of claims, the demarcation of CFRR boundaries on forest maps, and long-standing discrepancies between revenue and forest boundaries, he suggests establishing a digital forest rights registry to integrate various datasets and maintain transparency and accountability in decision-making. He further suggests that CFR rights recognition be started in a pilot mode in the areas where local leadership is inclined towards conservation and Joint Forest Management (JFM) has already been successful. He asserts that the CFRR framework should not bypass the ‘well-established’ JFM programme and suggests a co-management model that authorises JFM Committees to implement management plans, while Gram Sabhas will set priorities, and the FD will provide technical and legal support.
The appeal by a serving forest officer for ensuring care and rigour is to be appreciated, and it resonates with the efforts of experts and proponents of the FRA who are also recommending a systematic approach based on proper capacity-building. The past experience with ‘mission-mode’ recognition of community access/use rights (CRs) in MP, which resulted in wrong areas, duplication of areas to inflate numbers, and wrong names on titles, should have served as a lesson. Similarly, studies have shown that, in other states such as Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Maharashtra, mission-mode top-down recognition of CFRR titles also led to incorrect areas or only small portions of the forest within customary boundaries being recognised, ignoring the actual traditional boundaries. So, it is important to ensure that rights recognition is bottom-up and demand-based, but the state’s job is to ensure that there is widespread public awareness of all the rights, training and support to develop and submit claims, and training of higher-level committees to understand and process claims. In MP, while a cohort of master trainers is ready, training of sub-division level committees and village level forest rights committees on CFRRs is still pending. Experience from elsewhere shows that a village typically takes three months to prepare its CFFR claim properly. Setting unrealistic targets only ensure that shortcuts will be taken and village residents will be left out of the loop.
The suggestion to establish a digital forest rights registry could be advantageous for displaying CFRR areas on administrative maps. However, the resolution of discrepancies between the forest and the revenue departments needs policy intervention followed by ground-level rectification. Digitalisation can only help in the identification of discrepancies but cannot solve them. Moreover, the conflicts of boundaries between forest and revenue departments don’t affect the claim-making and recognition of CFRR too much. It has been already clarified in the state FRA manual that forest lands that are disputed, such as orange areas, still come under the definition of ‘forest land’, and rights can be recognised over such lands.
Procedural clarifications and discussions on what shape post-CFRR governance will take are important, but a prior critical question is whether the forest bureaucracy is genuinely willing to recognise CFRR rights, setting aside their deep insecurity over the authority of decision-making on forests being handed to Gram Sabhas. For 16 years since FRA implementation began, the MP FD has been completely against CFRRs, calling them unnecessary. Details of the mapping and verification process matter but can be addressed through training. Inter-village conflict is also a significant issue, but the biggest source of inter-village conflict is the forest departments encouraging some villages to hang on to their JFM allocations that overlap other villages’ customary boundaries. While the unhealthy focus on IFR rights alone for 15 years cannot be waved aside, recognising CFRRs will get communities to think of the forest rather than only thinking of agricultural lands. But all these issues begin to sound like excuses unless the forest bureaucracy categorically accepts that CFRR-based governance, which will dismantle the FD’s monopoly on forest management, is the way to go.
One particularly sore point in MP, which demonstrates the hidden reluctance to let go of control, is the determination of the boundary of the community forest resource (CFR). The FRA says CFRR can be recognised for all the forestland within the customary or traditional boundary of the village, regardless of the administrative boundaries of the forest and revenue departments, which we know were the creation of a colonial administration. (In the Central Provinces, the forester made sure to keep rich forests outside official revenue village boundaries.) The forest bureaucracy today insists that customary boundaries cannot extend beyond revenue boundaries, refusing to accept the idea that customary boundaries must prevail. In successive training programmes, foresters have kept questioning the legal validity of traditional boundaries and even the definition of a village itself. Hundreds of CFRR claims have been pending in MP for years. A forest official, responding to a Gram Sabha’s request for resolving their pending CFRR claim, categorically said traditional boundaries don’t hold legal validity in CFRR recognition and only forest lands within revenue village boundaries shall be considered for CFRR recognition. In a meeting of village Forest Rights Committee members and the FD in western MP, an official denied the existence of customary boundaries and did not show up when the people asked him to walk along with them to see their traditional boundary markers.
While discussing any model for post-CFRR governance, including the one Mishra is proposing, the risks of accommodating the ‘established’ practices of JFM and its perils should not be brushed away. JFM lacks legal backing, the forest assigned to JFM Committees follows the discretion of the department, and JFM Committees are controlled by the department through the beat guards serving as their secretaries. The community participation in the JFM has been merely used as an instrument to achieve the goals of timber-oriented working plans that often conflict with the priorities of communities. Whereas the CFRR area reflects the community’s actual resource catchment, and the formation and functions of the Community Forest Resource Management Committee (CFRMC) are mandated by the rules of the FRA. The CFRMC is required to prepare and implement management plans as per the needs and priorities of the Gram Sabha only. No doubt there are cases where JFM Committees have restored forests and the community has benefitted; if so, CFR Gram Sabhas would naturally elect the same members to their CFRMCs and continue the good work. What is required is for the FD to shift its role from being a direct controller to a supporter. If the spirit of the FRA is accepted, the ambiguities in post-CFRR governance can be worked out over time to create a healthy, multi-layered governance.
It is generally seen when recognition of CFRR rights is about to happen, the forest bureaucracy expresses reservations and appeals for exercising caution in shifting from state-led management to community-led stewardship. Where does caution go when community rights are recognised in a top-down and shoddy manner? Where does caution go when forests are diverted unscrupulously for dams and mining without the complete recognition of community rights and proper consent of Gram Sabahs as mandated by the Niyamgiri judgement? Where does caution go when new programmes are rolled out for the use of forest land in violation of the FRA? Not long ago, the MP FD supported a proposal to lease out ‘degraded forests’ to private investors on 60-year leases, ignoring the fact that communities would likely have CFR rights on them. Even today, patches of forestlands have been registered for investment under the Green Credits Programme, ignoring again the fact that these lands are likely to fall within CFRR boundaries. Where does caution go when communities are relocated from tiger reserves without recognition of all their forest rights (as laid down in the Wildlife Act itself) and without thoroughly exploring the possibility of co-existence and co-management?
Thus, neither the haste of the state-level bureaucracy nor the half-hearted engagement of the FD with CFRR recognition is going to help democratise forest governance. The CFRR recognition is not an experiment or program to be piloted; it’s a legal mandate under the FRA. If foresters are serious about socially just and participatory forest conservation, CFRRs provide a wonderful opportunity for them to join hands with the communities, social movements, civil society and public intellectuals to bring it about.
Mohit Mahajan is with the CFR Central India Initiative of the Forests, Governance and Livelihoods programme in Ashoka Trust for Reserach in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE)
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth