On January 10, a letter from the Union tribal affairs ministry to all states brought back into the spotlight a fraught question: the relocation of forest-dwellers, ostensibly to protect wildlife.
The ministry’s letter noted that under the Forest Rights Act, such communities could not be “evicted or removed from forest land they occupy until the process of recognition and verification of their rights is complete”.
While the question of such relocation has been debated for decades, the ministry’s letter was a response to a relatively recent development, dating to June 2024.
That month, the National Tiger Conservation Authority sent a letter to 19 states, calling for the relocation of almost 65,000 families living inside critical tiger habitats across 53 tiger reserves on a “priority basis”. The letter noted that the “progress of village relocation is very slow and it poses grave concern in light of tiger conservation”.
Several organisations and gram sabhas wrote to the NTCA, the ministry of tribal affairs, and the ministry of environment, forest and climate change, demanding that this letter be withdrawn. They argued that such relocation would violate laws meant to protect the rights of forest dwellers. They added that they were particularly concerned that relocation would be carried out without the payment of fair compensation.
In its January letter, the tribal affairs ministry acknowledged these concerns. It observed that forest-dwelling communities had a wide range of rights under the Forest Rights Act and the Wildlife Protection Act, and directed states to develop an “institutional mechanism” to “ensure compliance” with these rights before relocation.
For instance, under the Forest Rights Act, before a forest-dwelling community is relocated, the free and informed consent of the appropriate gram sabha has to be procured.
The Wildlife Protection Act, too, prescribes certain protections before a community is relocated in the interest of protecting wildlife – such as that “an independent ecological and social scientist familiar with the area has to come to a conclusion that other reasonable options of co-existence” are not feasible.
Experts see the tribal affairs ministry’s intervention as a step in the right direction. At the same time, they argue, the fundamental problems with the NTCA’s actions remain unaddressed. “The root of the problem, the NTCA letter prioritising relocation, still exists,” said Tushar Dash, a forest rights researcher.
Dash and other experts argued that this problem was a part of a larger pattern, of the NTCA taking decisions that bypassed communities’ rights over forests – at the same time, they added, the body was not doing enough to fulfill its central function of protecting tiger habitats.
Scroll emailed the NTCA, seeking its responses to the criticisms that had been made of its functioning. This story will be updated if it responds.
The NTCA and its mandate
The NTCA is a statutory body whose members include representatives from the tribal affairs and environment ministry, as well as independent wildlife experts.
The authority was constituted by a 2006 amendment of the Wildlife Protection Act. The amendment designated the NTCA with 11 functions pertaining to tiger conservation. For instance, it was to ensure that no ecologically unsustainable use of land occurred within tiger reserves, lay down standards for tourism activities in these areas and maintain estimates of tiger populations in different regions.
The amendment also gave NTCA the power to issue directions to “any person, officer or authority” to ensure that tigers were protected. But it added an important caveat: that “no such direction shall interfere with or affect the rights of local people particularly the scheduled tribes”.
But experts point out that through its letters and directions, the NTCA has repeatedly bypassed provisions of laws meant to protect people’s rights to forests, and ensure fair relocation from tiger reserves. “NTCA is working beyond the mandate provided for it in its parent law, the law from where it gets its powers,” Dash said.
In a 2022 research paper, Asmita Kabra and Budhaditya Das examined official communication between 1972 and 2018 between the environment ministry, tribal ministry and the NTCA, as well as forest department officials across the country.
They found that in 2007, after the Forest Rights Act was enacted to protect the rights of those who live in or use forests, including protected areas, the NTCA directed the administrations of all protected areas to finalise and delineate “inviolate critical tiger habitats” – areas designated for tiger conservation. It asked officials to “to accord topmost priority to this task”.
The NTCA’s move to create inviolate spaces was not necessarily in conflict with its mandate, “since it is the role of the authority to protect tigers and their habitats”, noted Akshay Chettri, an independent conservation policy researcher. But, he argued, “when it says in its letter that these processes should be expedited, as soon as possible, or prioritised, without asking states to follow the due procedures meant for safeguarding communities’ rights according to the Wildlife Protection Act, then that is in violation of its own mandate”.
Relocation over forest rights
The NTCA’s efforts towards relocation have been similarly contentious. In 2008, the same year that the tribal ministry began implementing the Forest Rights Act across forest areas, the NTCA announced a voluntary relocation scheme from critical tiger habitats and issued guidelines for it.
Under the guidelines, any family residing within a tiger reserve would be paid a cash compensation of Rs 10 lakh to relocate to an area outside it. (This amount was increased to Rs 15 lakh in 2021.) Alternatively, the family could receive smaller amounts of money, and instead receive different kinds of rehabilitation support, such as allocation of agricultural land or assistance with the construction of a house.
Kabra and Das noted that the process by which forest-dwelling communities could secure the benefits of their rights under the FRA would be “long and tedious”. Thus, accepting the offer of money to relocate would have seemed to them like the only viable option, they argued.
For many forest dwellers, it became “their only realistic chance to access hitherto-denied benefits of development”, they wrote, adding that the families faced an “unenviable choice between an immediate cash transfer versus a protracted and uncertain struggle for rights”.
Over the next decade, the tribal ministry repeatedly raised concerns that the rights of forest dwellers were not being recognised, Kabra and Das found. For instance, in 2010, it wrote to the environment ministry that “no action has been taken by state governments for recognition of rights of forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes in the national parks and sanctuaries”. Kabra and Das also quoted a 2015 letter where the ministry noted that “FRA was not being implemented in sanctuaries and national parks and relocation was taking place without completion of FRA process”.
But, as Kabra and Das noted, the NTCA continued to take “several measures to delay and circumvent the implementation of the Forest Rights Act”. At the same time, it also wrote letters to state bureaucracies, directing them to take steps under the Wildlife Protection Amendment Act that, experts argued, would be detrimental to communities living inside the tiger habitats – such as creating inviolate tiger habitats, free of any human activity.
In fact, it only seemed to double down on its approach. In 2017, the NTCA wrote to all states with land under tiger reserves, directing that forest rights not be granted to any families in reserves. It stated, “no rights shall be conferred in critical tiger habitat”.
As a result, several states paused the process of recognition of forest rights of communities in such areas. In Maharashtra’s Tadoba, local gram sabhas found through filing right-to-information requests that the FRA process was paused as a result of the 2017 guidelines. Researchers heard of a similar situation in Odisha’s Simlipal also. In Jharkhand’s Palamu, forest rights claims of 61 Adivasis were rejected repeatedly as a result of the 2017 guidelines.
The National Commission for Scheduled Tribe made note of the fact that the NTCA had trampled on the forest rights of these families. In a meeting in October 2018, the commission said that it “strongly feels” that the 2017 letter was “in complete violation” of both the Forest Rights Act and the Wildlife Protection Act. The minutes of a meeting of the commission that month, which Scroll has seen, note that the body observed that these letters “have created hindrance to the statutory provisions in the FRA”, and recommended, “all these NTCA letters should be withdrawn immediately”.
Following this, the NTCA appeared to moderate its approach. In 2018, Kabra and Das wrote, the NTCA asked states with tiger reserves to “take action as appropriate” while settling the rights of forest-dwelling communities, and adhere to the provisions of “the Forest Rights Act in critical tiger habitats”.
But even in this letter, it added a caveat that clearly prioritised relocation over rights. It directed that “the voluntary village rehabilitation package . . . be explored a priori so as to benefit tribal communities by increasing their exposure to welfare and development schemes of the government”.
Another statute
Many experts argue that the NTCA’s guidelines for relocation should no longer be treated as valid.
Dash said that the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, which was passed in 2013, “clearly supersedes” the NTCA’s relocation guidelines.
He explained that the LARR contains a special provision for those forest-dwelling families who stand to lose their rights under the FRA because their land is being acquired. It states that the category of “affected persons” under the law includes those “Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have lost any of their forest rights recognised” under the FRA “due to acquisition of land”.
Further, one section of the act has special protections for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, stating “as far as possible, no acquisition of land shall be made in Scheduled Areas” and that it should be done “only as a demonstrable last resort”.
The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes has also argued that “all proposals for village relocation should be prepared as per the provisions of the LARR Act”. It objected particularly to the compensation offered under the NTCA’s guidelines – in October 2018, it noted that it was of the “clear view” that the compensation package of Rs 15 lakh that the NTCA proposed was too low.
“If followed in letter and spirit, the provisions of the LARR are definitely more likely to prevent forced displacement and provide better compensation, resettlement and rehabilitation outcomes,” said Kabra, currently associate researcher at New Delhi’s Centre de Sciences Humaines, in an interview with Scroll. “This requires a good social impact assessment study that takes into account various types of ecosystem services that local communities get from forests.”
But, as Kabra and Das noted in their paper, since the NTCA chose to take the “volition” route, they could “bypass” safeguards that LARR provided.
Other researchers have also noted problems with NTCA’s voluntary relocation scheme. They found that many such instances of relocation under the NTCA’s scheme were not voluntary, and rather involved violence and coercion.
In a 2019 paper, researcher Eleonara Fanari documented 11 instances across India where communities were coerced to relocate or were dissatisfied with the terms of relocation by NTCA. This included in the Melghat tiger reserve in Maharashtra, where communities were coerced to sign papers for relocation, and Achanakmar in Chhattisgarh, where relocated villages did not receive proper rehabilitation as per the NTCA’s guidelines. Fanari also found in her field research that “when consent was taken, it was mostly under pressure or threat, or induced in other ways”, including “denial of access to basic health and education facilities, and schemes like MNREGA, children immunization programmes”.
Such forced and violent relocations continue to occur. In December 2024, 54 gram sabhas from Madhya Pradesh wrote to the tribal ministry stating that in various tiger reserves in the state, villages were being relocated in a “non-voluntary, unconstitutional, and forcible manner”. They also noted that the most recent process of relocation for Rani Durgawati, a new tiger reserves in the state, “was not in compliance with the LARR, 2013”.
Underperforming other duties
These conflicts have been exacerbated by recent moves by the NTCA to demarcate new tiger reserves in areas that many experts say do not meet the criteria to be deemed as such.
Specifically, in August 2023, the NTCA gave its approval in principle for tiger reserves in Rajasthan’s Kumbalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary and Karauli-Dholpur. But, experts noted, there has been no evidence of tigers in Kumbalgarh. Further, they argued that Kumbalgarh is not connected to any other tiger corridor in the region – that is, there is minimal possibility of tigers from other reserves wandering into Kumbalgarh.
“On one hand they are creating tiger reserves where there are no tigers, and on the other hand, NTCA is not doing the work they should be doing according to their mandate,” said Debadityo Sinha, lead of the climate and ecosystems team at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.
Further, he explained that the NTCA is neglecting some of its core functions, like ensuring that areas that link one tiger reserve to another or to another protected area are not used for any activity that is harmful to that ecology. “It is in these connecting forests and buffers that many hotels and guesthouses are coming up,” Sinha said. “The authority has also unnecessarily engaged itself in the introduction of African cheetah in India, which is not at all in its mandate.”
Chettri also argued that the NTCA was failing to fulfil some of its key functions under the Wildlife Protection Act, among them to “disallow any ecologically unsustainable land use such as mining, industry and other projects within the tiger reserves”.
He cited the example of the Ken-Betwa river linking project in the Panna tiger reserve as an instance in which the NTCA was not carrying out this responsibility. “Parts of the critical tiger habitat and buffer zone will be submerged,” he said.
He added that Panna was a significant case because of its history – in 2009, it became the second tiger reserve in India, after Sariska, to lose all its tigers. It took years of effort from the government and local communities to reintroduce and maintain a tiger population, making it one of the country’s most successful tiger conservation stories. Experts fear those gains may be squandered. “In 2021, the lease for the diamond mine by the state government to NMDC, which had expired on 31st December, 2020, was also extended,” Chettri added.
Another important function that the act designates to the NTCA is the approval of tiger conservation plans for states. This process has been slow – in 2016, the NTCA had not approved such plans for 16 tiger reserves in the country. More recently, the Supreme Court pulled up the Uttarakhand government for not having tiger conservation plans for the Rajaji and Corbett National Parks.
“It may be the responsibility of the state government to prepare these plans, but the onus also falls on the NTCA to seek accountability,” said Chettri.
It is a grave enough problem that the NTCA has on many occasions violated people’s rights, Chettri said, “but by not carrying out its functions, NTCA is not working for the good for the wildlife either”.
