Forest rights and tribals? Yawn!
One would have expected several newspapers to comment on this important piece of legislation, but only two did.
You don`t say!
Darius Nakhoonwala
Last week, the Lok Sabha adopted the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill, 2006. It is a very important piece of legislation and one would have expected several newspapers to comment on it. In fact, only two did - The Hindu and the Telegraph. Shows you how aware our editors and their lackey leader writers are, innit?
The Bill is important because it seeks to protect and empower some of the weakest and most marginalised people in out country, the forest dwellers, known variously as adimjati in Hindi and tribals in English. It will give them security of tenure, access to minor forest produce, and a big stake in the preservation of natural spaces. An important reason for increasing Naxalism is the absence of these protections.
The Hindu got to the nub of it. "The new law, an electoral promise of the UPA and one for which the Left parties campaigned actively, will provide heritable but not alienable or transferable tenures for Scheduled Tribes and other forest dwellers if they have occupied the lands (up to a maximum of four hectares per family or community) for three generations from 1930, with December 13, 2005 as the cut-off date. The beneficiaries will be primarily identified by gram sabhas…"
The Telegraph said the same thing but a little more comprehensively. Where human rights, human and animal coexistence, and the conservation of nature are concerned, it said, "legislation is only a beginning for achieving such a difficult and delicate balance... This is the first proper attempt to implement a complicated issue of natural justice - the conferring or restitution of land and produce rights for forest dwellers, tribal or otherwise."
The Telegraph leader writer had also quite clearly thought through his edit, which pointed out that there Bill had two components, a political one and an ecological one. " The passing of this bill, and on terms formulated and pushed through by the left, marks a different kind of political mobilization of forest-dwelling tribals, Madhya Pradesh being another state in which such a transition has been significantly initiated."
It is indeed a shame that only two newspapers saw the new law as being worthy of comment. After all, forests account for 20 per cent of India`s land area and those humans who live in them for 10 per cent of the population.
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