IFR review: States do dubious paperwork, cite baseless reasons for refusing forest rights to tribals, DTE finds

This story has been updated

This is the third in a series on the review process of rejected Individual Forest Rights claims. Here are the first and second parts. 

Individual Forest Rights (IFR), without which forest dwellers stand to be evicted from their native habitations, have been awarded to very few applicants across the country. 

As of February 2020, almost half the IFR applications that were previously rejected and sent for review were rejected once again, according to official data. 

The Supreme Court stayed its eviction order in 2019 and asked states to supply information on the number of rejections, procedure followed, reasons for rejection and if the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and tribals had been given the chance to produce evidence before rejection of claims. 

On further discussion with the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA), the states undertook the process of suo motu review of rejected claims. 

By February 2020, 14 states had already rejected 543,432 claims during the suo motu reviews of the around 1.1 million rejected applications. This is a rejection rate of almost 50 per cent during the review process. 

MoTA has since then not released any new data regarding the review process and the number of claims rejected or approved during the process since February, 2020. 

In a document accessed by Down To Earth (DTE) from October 2022, Chhattisgarh had told MoTA, during a meeting held under Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda, that it had approved 34,000 rejected IFR claims during the review process. 

In 2019, the state had taken suo motu cognisance to review all of the 450,000 rejected claims. As of November 2022, around 399,000 claims were rejected in the state. This means that during the review process only 34,000 — less than 10 per cent — claims were approved. 

Vijendra Aznabi of Oxfam, speaking about Chhattisgarh’s rejected claims, told DTE that 50-60 per cent of the IFR claims during review had been rejected again on baseless grounds such as ‘claimants had applied for the title in protected areas’ or ‘lack of documents’. “Both these reasons for rejection are invalid. It is actually about the state’s reluctance to grant them rights on top of everything else.”

As per the The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA) guidelines, IFR claims cannot be rejected because of lack of documents; they have to send it back to the Forest Rights Committee for review.

A source in Chhattisgarh told DTE on condition of anonymity that even the review process happened without adhering to guidelines of the FRA, since many rejected IFR claims had gone missing from the record and could not be traced. The reasons for rejection had also not been conveyed to the claimants at either the Gram Sabha, sub-divisional-level committee (SDLC) or district-level committee (DLC). 

The review process by the state officials involved some more questionable steps.

The source added that reviewing 450,000 rejected IFR claims was a humongous task. To keep the paper-work up to date, in case the government has to produce it before the Supreme Court later, offiicials as the dristict and sub-divisional levels tried to verify claims without supporting documents with village-level samitees and other local bodies. Claimants who could be verified were sent back-dated notices, citing reasons of rejection, he said.

The process was done at the Gram Sabha, SDLC and DLC levels but not with due procedure as in most cases the Gram Sabha meeting did not even happen. In a few when it did, the mandatory quorum was not present, according to the source. 

This was just an exercise to get the paperwork in place to be prepared for the Supreme Court’s hearing, he added. “All the process happened manually but the Chhattisgarh government is now in the process of digitising all the approved claims.”

Odisha reviewed 148,870 rejected IFR claims at the DLC level and rejected 1,40,504 again — a rejection rate of more than 94 per cent. 

Y Giri Rao, chief executive of Vasundhara, a non-profit working on FRA in Odisha, said before 2019, the DLCs in Odisha did not reject claims as its decision was binding and tribals who apply for the land titles generally do not have the resources to approach the court. “But after the 2019 SC order, the state started rejecting in huge numbers.”

Another independent expert on FRA, Tushar Dash, said in a conversation with DTE that there have been severe lapses in the review procedure in Odisha, amounting to rejection of a large number of claims as many cases were reviewed during the pandemic. These claims had been re-rejected without the Gram Sabha’s review or knowledge. 

There were several cases of missing records of rejected IFR claims in Odisha too, leaving the officials clueless on the review process, when the records didn’t exist at any level — Gram Sabha, SDLC or DLC.

In some cases, DLC just verbally informed the claimants that their applications were rejected.

In other incidents, several claimants who got the titles had complained that their names had been mentioned in the rejected list by the DLC. Some of the IFR claims of Scheduled Tribes people had been rejected on grounds of caste, while some were rejected stating that the area claimed for IFR did not fall on forest land, added Dash. 

Three wildlife non-profits — Bengaluru-based Wildlife First, Maharashtra-based Nature Conservation Society (NCS) and Tiger Research and Conservation Trust (TRACT) — in January 2014 had filed an application before the Supreme Court questioning the constitutionality of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and requesting the the court to pass orders of eviction of such forest dwellers whose claims had been rejected. This had come six years after Wildlife First, Wildlife Trust of India and other conservationists had questioned the validity of FRA in the apex court.

The application filed by the three wildlife non-profits are just using IFR as a small target to achieve a bigger goal, Mohan Hirabai Hiralal, a noted forest rights activist in Maharashtra said. “IFR claimants are being used as bait to prove that tribal communities clear forest land for cultivation. This in turn will give the impression that FRA is bad for protection of forests. The aim of the case is to do away with Community Forest Resource Right (CFRR) that passes the right to use, conserve and manage the forests in the hands of the communities.”

With communities owning large areas of forest land, it becomes impossible to divert these chunks of land for developmental activities, which is not in the interest of political and economic lobbies, he added. “The lobbies that support the political overlords need land for expansion of their projects and wealth. This case is just a way to use IFR as bait to declare FRA as a whole, unconstitutional so that no CFRR titles can be given and the forests stay under the management of the forest department,” the expert noted. 

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