On the morning of June 4, hundreds of tribal people in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district travelled in trucks, tractors, autorickshaws, and motorcycles from their hamlets to the District Collector’s Office in Gadchiroli city. All of them shared one goal: to stop the government from acquiring their land, their only means of survival.

The State government intends to acquire forest land in the area for a mega steel plant, an airport, and an industrial township. The tribal communities, who are fiercely opposed to the acquisition, waged peaceful sit-in protests for two days, after which the government backtracked. For now, government officials have assured the affected villagers that land acquisition will proceed only after obtaining their consensus and clearance. While it is a partial victory for the tribal people, even they know only too well that the battle is not yet over.

“We want our land. It is the only thing we have. The compensation money won’t feed us for a lifetime. But the land will be with us forever,” said Rupesh Jegthe, a tribal youth from Hirapur village of Gadchiroli. “Parliament passed a law recognising our rights over forest land. We have been farming here for generations. Why does the government want to throw us out ?”

The law Rupesh refers to is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, commonly known as the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA). Passed by Parliament in 2006, this law became operational in 2008. It is a historic law, and the first since Independence to recognise the forest rights of tribal and indigenous communities across India. Yet, 20 years on, it appears that the government itself is the FRA’s most persistent violator.

The demand for the FRA dates back to the 1980s. Forest-dwelling communities across India were facing severe hardships owing to stringent colonial-era forest laws. In many States, they were denied their rightful share of agricultural land and were being criminalised for farming on ancestral forest land. The FRA was meant to correct this and other “historical injustices” against tribal and forest-dwelling communities, and protect their rights. The 2006 Act not only accepted their rights to forest land, but also created a legal mechanism to claim both individual and community rights over forest land. It further empowered gram sabhas to promote forest conservation through communities. As a result, tribal people and forest-dwelling communities across India began claiming their traditional farmlands within the forest.

According to data published by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, a total of 51,23,104 such claims for land rights have been filed over the past 20 years. Of these, 25,11,375 titles—about 48 per cent—have been granted. A total of 43,73,431 claims have been disposed of, which means that almost 85 per cent of all claims have been settled till date.

The States doing remarkable work to clear these claims are Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana, whereas States such as Gujarat, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, and the north-eastern region lag significantly behind. Among the top performing States, Maharashtra and Odisha have created effective mechanisms for clearing community claims. Maharashtra has been particularly successful in empowering local communities, as exemplified in the case of the village of Mendha Lekha. Conversely, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana have lagged in empowering communities to file claims and creating a mechanism for income generation.

The Mendha Lekha model

Mendha Lekha was the first village in India to secure community forest rights. In 2009, after a six-year-long legal battle, this village secured the right to manage and harvest 1,800 hectares of surrounding forest land. Located in Gadchiroli district, this small village has a population of just 400, all of whom belong to the Maria Gond tribe. Today, the gram sabha of Mendha Lekha generates an annual revenue of Rs.1 crore largely through bamboo harvesting. Following the Mendha Lekha model, nearly 300 villages in Bhandara, Gondia, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli districts across the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra have successfully empowered themselves as self-reliant communities.

The Sixteenth Finance Commission has emphasised the need to empower the village as a self-sustained economic unit. Under the FRA, the tribal villages of Maharashtra have been building similar profiles of self-sustainability for years. However, development remains uneven across the tribal belts. In Wardha, a district of Sevagram where Mahatma Gandhi established his ashram, not a single community claim has been accepted under the FRA till date.

Maharashtra’s East Vidarbha region has created an ecosystem for community empowerment through the FRA. States like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha have provided institutional support for the villages selling their produce. In Odisha, the gram sabhas sell bamboo directly to government agencies. This kind of state support is necessary to sustain the tribal economy, at least in the first few years.

The real challenge in the implementation of the FRA is the government itself. Data show that almost 50 per cent of the claims have not been accepted. About 30 per cent of the overall claims were rejected, and 20 per cent are still pending as of December 31, 2025. The most common reasons for rejection are inadequate verification, excessive demands for documentation, the government’s failure to recognise traditional forms of evidence, limited opportunities for appeal, and systemic corruption.

In 2018, nearly 50,000 farmers, mostly tribal people from Nashik, Palghar, Ahilya Nagar, and Thane districts, travelled on foot to Mumbai to demand action on their pending claims. This “Long March”, led by All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) president Ashok Dhavale (now a CPI(M) Politburo member), drew widespread media coverage, and won the hearts of even the urban middle class for its discipline. For years, the farmers had been demanding that their rights to forest lands be recognised, but the government was too slow to act. Finally, the 50,000 farmers walked to Mumbai to make their hardships visible to the world.

Dr Ajit Navale, the then general secretary of AIKS and now the CPI(M) general secretary for Maharashtra, said: “Thousands of claims submitted by farmers in Nashik, Dhule, Nandurbar, Ahilyanagar, Palghar, and Raigad districts are still pending with the government. Chief Ministers kept promising to expedite the claim clearance procedure. But the bureaucracy on the ground creates hurdles all the time. Poor, illiterate tribals are forced to visit bloc-level officers every week. But the process is slow and tiring.”

This institutional resistance to claims approval is worst in Gujarat and Rajasthan. Pravin Mote, a veteran activist from Maharashtra who works on tribal forest rights at the national level, said: “Often, forest and revenue officers deliberately create hurdles to deny the tribal people their rights. The Maharashtra situation is comparatively better. But States like Gujarat, Rajasthan, Bihar, and Jharkhand are worse.”

Another major challenge that FRA implementation faces is conflict within Protected Areas. Tiger reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, and national parks continue to generate tension between conservation authorities and the local communities. Chhindwara district in Madhya Pradesh, the Yavatmal and Chandrapur districts of Maharashtra, and South Goa are direct examples of such conflict. Owing to pressure from their higher-ranking officials, local forest and conservation authorities routinely delay clearing the claims of the local tribal communities on forest lands. Instead, they continually demand various documents and pieces of evidence to postpone the allotment of the land to claimants, thus delaying the implementation of the FRA.

The greatest challenge to the implementation of the FRA comes from mega-development projects, including mining, steel plants, and related infrastructure projects. From the steel plant conflict in Gadchiroli in Maharashtra to the bauxite mining dispute in Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha, from the coalfields of Hasdeo Arand in Chhattisgarh to displacement along the Narmada river in Gujarat, conflicts between tribal people and the government agencies are increasing all over India. The FRA was enacted to protect the land and the rights of these forest dwellers. Yet, governments, both at the State and central levels, frequently cite reasons such as national wealth, strategic importance, and critical mineral shortage to justify diverting forest land for corporate projects.

Mote said: “The objective of the FRA was to empower tribals, as well as conserve forests. Only the implementation of the FRA will do that. There are many examples where the FRA is implemented, the tribals of the area are empowered, and the forest cover has increased. But when the FRA is sidelined to clear mega projects, neither empowerment takes place nor can the forest sustain.”

Palghar district in Maharashtra’s Konkan region, which adjoins Gujarat, perfectly illustrates this dynamic. A predominantly tribal region, Palghar is currently witnessing the influx of several mega projects, including the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Bullet Train, the Vadhvan Port and mega-highway connecting Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority in Raigad district to Virar in Palghar. Most local tribal communities in Palghar have strongly opposed these projects. In several cases in Vikramgad and Dahanu blocs, individual claims under the FRA were accepted by the authorities, only for the same tribal landowners to receive land acquisition notices within a few months or a year.

Vinod Nikole, the CPI(M) MLA representing Dahanu, has repeatedly raised this issue in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly. But all he gets are empty assurances that do not translate into action on the ground. Nikole said: “First, the government refuses to accept claims of forest land. When it finally does, it snatches the same land back within a year or two. They [tribal people] can’t survive in cities. You [the government] are not allowing them to stay in their ancestral forest land. Where will these people go?”

Parliament promised forest rights to India’s tribal communities in 2006. Yet, two decades later, these communities are left with no guarantee that the historic promise will not be broken.

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