News: RTI reveals that thousands of forest rights titles have been reported missing from government records over the past 17 months in Chhattisgarh.
About Community Forest Rights (CFRs)
- Community Forest Rights (CFRs) are collective rights that recognize and empower forest-dwelling communities, especially scheduled tribes (STs) and other traditional forest dwellers (OTFDs), to use, manage, conserve, and protect forest resources within their customary boundaries.
- Legal framework
- Enabling law: The CFRs are granted under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, commonly called the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006.
- Provision: The Section 3(1)(i) of the FRA vests the right “to protect, regenerate or conserve or manage any community forest resource which they have been traditionally protecting and conserving for sustainable use.”
- The Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) become the legal authority to govern these resources.
- Definitions in law: ‘Community Forest Resource’ means customary common forest land within traditional or customary boundaries of the village, including reserved/protected forests, national parks, and sanctuaries to which the community had traditional access.
- Features of CFRs
- It allows individuals and communities to get various types of titles over forest areas which they live on, use for their livelihoods, or collect produce from.
- The titles are distributed after each application is cleared by gram sabhas, sub-divisional level committees, and district-level committees.
- As per the FRA, once titles are granted, they are neither transferable nor alienable but can only be inherited.
- The law does provide for diversion in specific cases, where community facilities are being planned or for government projects but only with the consent of the Gram Sabhas concerned.
- Significance
- CFRs ensure sustainable livelihoods of the community.
- These rights give the authority to the Gram Sabha to adopt local traditional practices of forest conservation and management within the community forest resource boundary.
- These rights also underline the integral role that forest dwellers play in the sustainability of forests and in the conservation of biodiversity.
