Continuing with its avowed policy of throwing open the country’s natural resources for exploitation by private capital without regard to either the people or the environment, the Modi government has rushed through parliament two laws that will have dire consequences. One is to amend the Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA) and the other to amend the Mines and Mineral (Development and Regulation) (MMDR) Act.
Passed in 1980, the FCA had strict provisions for preventing arbitrary de-reservation of lands designated as forests. The intention was to conserve the forests from reckless depredation. Some exemptions were included later, in 2006, through the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights Act), known as FRA, to give rights of land to tribal communities and for providing basic amenities to them.
What the bill introduced by the Modi government does is to dilute the definition of forests and weaken the whole regulatory structure of the existing law by providing a slew of exemptions for building roads, railway lines, security infrastructure, defence camps, wireless stations, bridges, trenches, pipelines, and even for zoos, safaris and eco-tourism facilities. It redefines the concept of forests as set out by the Supreme Court in 1996, whereby those areas not defined as forest were to be treated as “deemed forest”.
The bill overrides the FRA provisions of mandatory consent from gram sabhas and other monitoring committees, thus leaving tribal communities completely defenceless against the takeover of their lands. In one fell blow, not only will forests become open to destruction but their dwellers will be displaced. It is clear that this is being done to get rid of the regulatory limits, put by laws and Supreme Court orders, to takeover of forest lands.
This change will decriminalise offences under the Act, and blurs the definition of ‘codified traditional knowledge’, while exempting AYUSH practitioners from the law. All this will open the way to unbridled extraction of flora and fauna driven by corporate interests, especially pharmaceutical entities.
P Sudhir
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