Improving IFR recognition in Forest Villages : First training programme at Baiga Chak, Pondi forest village, Dindori (Madhya Pradesh)

ATREE’s Community Forest Rights (CFR) Central India team, in collaboration with NYWCID, conducted two training workshops in the last week of March for the officials of Dindori district, focusing on building capacity to properly recognize individual forest rights (IFRs) in the Forest Villages (FVs) of Dindori’s Baiga Chak region. This is part of a mission-mode engagement that the district administration has requested of ATREE to resolve large-scale issues related to individual forest rights in the FVs.

FVs in India are villages created by the (Imperial or Indian) Forest Department within forests to ensure labour availability for forestry operations. Comprising mostly the Adivasis whose customary rights to the forests were set aside, these villages are administered entirely by the Forest Department (FD). They thus represent an extreme form of the historic injustice perpetrated on forest-dwellers in colonial India. Despite the passage of the Forest Rights Act 2006, which has special provisions for Forest Villages, the situation in FVs in central India has remained largely unchanged. Madhya Pradesh contains 952 FVs, of which 86 are in Dindori district alone. 

ATREE’s CFR team realized that the villagers of FVs at Baiga Chak were reluctant to claim community rights until their cultivation and residential plots were properly recognized as IFRs. The team’s analysis showed that there was a huge shortfall between the area recognized and what should have been, given that these villages were created by the FD itself. The team, with the help of interns from ATREE’s MSc programme, carried out wall-to-wall mapping of farms and homestead lands in two FVs. The results of the field mapping and survey, which showed how poor and arbitrary the non-recognition of IFRs was, were presented to the District Collector, Dindori and other officials. The Collector immediately initiated a process for completing IFR recognition in 20 FVs, and has asked ATREE to provide technical support and guidance. Following this, two training workshops were organized. One in Pondi FV on March 28 for the frontline staff of the Forest, Revenue and Panchayat Raj departments. The second workshop at Sheetalpani FV was for PESA mobilisers and CM interns who are expected to lead the work in the target villages, beyond the two pilots carried out by ATREE. The latter workshop was accompanied by the FD verifying the mapping work done by ATREE’s team in Sheetalpani.

It is hoped that resolving the IFR issue will enable the communities to focus on community rights and therefore community forest management.