The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, popularly known as the Forests Rights Act (FRA), was enacted in 2007 through the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) to correct the ‘historic injustice done to forest-dwelling communities’.
These communities were cultivating/occupying forest land and using forest produce since ages but had no tenurial security, as their rights of occupation and usage were not recorded during the settlement process.
The Act recognises and vests individual forest-dwellers with forest rights to live in and cultivate forest land that was occupied before 13 Dec 2005 and grants community forest rights to manage, protect, regenerate the forest and to own and dispose minor forest products from forests where they had traditional access.
According to the findings of a government Committee set up to study implementation of the Act, most States have concentrated almost entirely on implementing the provisions for individual forest rights (IFRs) and some States have achieved significant progress in granting individual rights. However, implementation of the Community Rights (CFR) aspect of the FRA has been very poor in all states and therefore its potential to achieve livelihood security for collection of minor forest products and changes in forest governance along with strengthening of forest conservation, has hardly been achieved.
