In a travesty of the Forest Rights Act set up to protect indigenous communities, members of the Lippa tribal village in Himachal Pradesh are being denied individual forest rights.
Text by Manshi Asher
Photographs by Sumit Mahar
Himachal Pradesh, a State where two-thirds of the landscape is categorised as forest and 90 per cent of the population is dependent on it, has been slack in implementing the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA). The story of a tiny tribal village called Lippa, from where 47 individual forest rights claims were among the first to be rejected in the State, reveals the grim reality of a betrayal.
Enacted by Parliament to recognise the legal rights of forest-dependent communities on land categorised as forest, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, the FRA in short, is still mired in myriad contestations, in idea and in implementation, both nationally and on the ground in States such as Himachal Pradesh.
