The environment ministry recently gave green signal to a set of rules that made it easier for industries to grab forest. It slapped down one of the strongest protections for forest-dwelling tribespeople by changing the Forest Conservation Rules. The new rules set the ministry free to pocket money and grant licences to industries to take over forest without first seeking the legal consent of tribespeople, who had the legal right to veto. Nor did they now have to ensure that the tribal rights are ‘settled’, a formal recognition that they have been living for generations in the forest.
However, when news broke, the ministry bristled and claimed the new rules don’t dilute the tribal rights. Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav went to town claiming, “No rule or provision of any act is being diluted”.
The tribal ministry too, said there was nothing bad in the law for tribespeople. But The Reporters’ Collective has now accessed documents that reveal the intention of the environment ministry under the Narendra Modi government: It considered its sacred duty of ensuring tribal rights, a precondition to grant licence to take over forest, a “bottleneck” to growth of industries. It cheered when other industry-linked ministries suggested that it bin the responsibility.
Documents reveal the environment ministry had since 2019 fostered the intention to rid itself of the responsibility to ensure tribal rights. And the Tribal Affairs Ministry, which had earlier acted as a bulwark against the pressure to dilute the forest rights of the tribespeople, was not consulted by the environment ministry while amending the rules but the entire gamut of ministries that see people and protection of the forests as roadblock were consulted.
New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research’s Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon neatly sum up the state of environmental laws in their book ‘Development of Environmental Laws in India’: “The endgame in Indian environmental law is political resource distribution as the environment laws and principals are stretched in many directions by powerful stakeholders or interest groups”.
The environment ministry initially wanted to further water down the forest clearance rules. File noting shows the ministry wanted to leave it to the states to give the final approval after checking whether the project developer had followed up on all the statutory conditions.
In their defence, the environment ministry didn’t entirely leave it to the states to give the sanctions, which would have upended the reason why a ministry of environment and forests was set up in the first place. Eventually, it settled for a process in which the project developer pays the Centre to get licence to chop down forest, before the state government reviews compliance with all laws, including the Forest Rights Act. But that’s akin to presenting the states with a fait accompli.
The story by my colleague Tapasya unravels the Janus-faced environment ministry’s goal: hunt with the industries but pretend to run with the greens. Tapasya traces the process of drafting the new Forest Conservation Rules and the factors that influenced the environment ministry’s decision that undermined the hard-won rights of forest dwellers.
Click here to read the story published in Article 14.