Tumbahra & Churiyara became one of the 1st nagar panchayats to receive CFRR titles
Women of Tumbahra nagar panchayat holding the CFRR. Photo: Purushottam Singh Thakur Chhattisgarh became the first state to grant community forest resource rights (CFRR) to peri-urban governance units (nagar panchayat) last year.
Tumbahra and Churiyara under Nagri block in Dhamtari district were among the nagar panchayats to receive the title but had different socio-economic outcomes.
A major section of the population in these two nagar panchayats depends on agriculture and forest produce like mahua, char, amla, medicinal herbs and gathering of tendu leaves sold under state control through intermediaries.
The residents of Tumbahra in Dhamtari district, Chhattisgarh, who were granted forest rights for the largest area (2,746.722 hectares), attributed their success in the fight for forest rights to the unity among them.
Only people from the Gond tribe live in Tumbahra and all of them were happy with the area of forest they will now have access to, said Chhattisgarh-based tribal rights activist Alok Shukla.
The title is the road to freedom and empowerment of the local adivasis, said Ganesh Markam, an official in the CFMC of Tumbahra, to DTE.
On June 15, 2022, when DTE visited Tumbahra, the nagar panchayat didn’t have electricity. But the spirit of the ‘claimants of forests’, as described in celebrated author Mahashweta Devi’s book ‘Jungle ke Daavedar’, reflected in the residents who had gathered that evening.
Tumbahra residents can now demand 80 per cent share in the sale of timber from the forest department, instead of the 20 per cent they have been receiving so far, said Nathlu Markam, another ward sabha resident, said.
So far, 123 villages in Dhamtari have got CFRR. “Unlike in the case of Jabarra (the first village in Chhattisgarh to get CFRR) where fear of forest department was visible and the villagers didn’t succeed in completely saving the forests from deforestation due to that fear, we at Tumbahra are going to stay united,” said Ganesh Markam. He added:
We are going to form an organisation of 12 villages with our neighbouring villages and continue our fight for forest rights. This way we won’t be left alone whenever forest department officials try to endanger our freedom and forest resources.
If every village that is the right claimant for CFRR gets it, all the Gram Sabhas and nagar panchayats, which have a mix of urban and rural population, can come together to save our ‘jal, jungle, jameen’,” the local said. Jal, jungle, jameen is the popular slogan of the country’s Adivasi movements.
Ganesh also expressed pride in the community of Tumbahra taking up responsibilities of planting saplings in the empty spaces that do not have any forest or vegetation cover. “We will form a Van Sangharash Samiti of over 140 participants along with our ward sabha in Dhamtari which will have gram sabhas from Sitanadi Tiger Reserve’s core and buffer zone,” said Markam. “This will strengthen our movement for the demand for implementation of forest rights.”
We have been very alert about making the rounds of the village in two groups each of men and women every night, Markam said. “There have been no instances of outsiders causing fire in our forests surrounding Tumbahra this year.”
The rural population of Tumbahra have better access to education, with an institute for higher education in Chhipli Gram Sabha near it, than the residents of CFRR villages within protected areas in Dhamtari and those far away.
In Churiyara, another nagar panchayat located a little distance away from Tumbahra and that also got the CFRR title, the residents are not united.
The mixed community of Kamars, Gonds, Muslims, Satnamis and Sahus are not on the same page about CFRR. The nagar panchayat was granted 678.180 hectares under CFRR.
Vishnu Bhaskar, a resident of Churiyara ward sabha complained about the lack of unity even among the Kamars and Gonds. He added:
The practice of cutting green and wet wood or bamboo is discouraged for environment and forest protection. But when we stopped a few men from the Kamar community from doing so, they misbehaved with us and hurled abuses.
The well-off among Other Backward Classes as well as other communities dominate us too, Bhaskar added. “It would have been better if we would have been more united after getting the patta.”
However, it enjoys equal facilities for education and health with the Chhipli institute and a hospital in the vicinity.
Chhattisgarh’s total forest cover is 55,610.57 square kilometres, which is 41.14 per cent of the state's geographical area. This area includes both protected areas recognised as wildlife sanctuaries and areas outside or in the corridors of protected area.
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