Social Contestations and Legal Transformations at the Margins of the Forest: Vagaries of Resource Politics in Rural India

In India, poor and marginalized communities living in and around forests depend on these forests for food, fodder, timber, and non-timber produce. The state considers such activities to be “abuse” but, claiming some form of usufruct, the communities fight against such government claims. This essay reviews three books that consider forest communities and their relational dynamics with forests, and describe the mechanisms through which contestations have emerged over issues of forest use rights and, ultimately, led to unitary demands for legal transformation and to the enactment of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA). The FRA recognizes the uncontentious hereditary and autochthonous right of forest-dwelling communities to use forest land and minor produce for maintaining a minimal livelihood. It gives them the right to hand forest land down to descendants, though not to transfer or sell it. However, the FRA process cannot stop the dispossession of lands from the forest communities, and it serves to benefit only a few, and on a case-by-case basis.