ABSTRACT
Forest rights in India have undergone a paradigm shift since the colonial times to the more recent Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006. From the centrality of state ownership of forest resources, the legal regime has evolved to recognise people’s rights upon them. However, there still exist spaces for ambiguity, raising the prospect of arbitrary judicial interpretation. This chapter closely examines the nature of evidence and evidentiary rules which the Forest Rights Act seeks to rely upon, and the complex tensions which have come into play in the operation of such evidentiary rules in a system of forest administration, which continues to be based on colonial legal architectures, and the compounding of such complexity by the digital revolution. Through the example of two cases represented by Banwasi Seva Ashram in Uttar Pradesh and Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti in Odisha, I will examine the different judicial attention meted to people’s rights over forest resources. I further explore how NGOs have countered the state’s technocratic language by evolving its own in people’s interest, though not without creating new problems. I argue that awareness about the FRA should be spread among the forest dwellers and more effort should be made to bring different laws in conformity with FRA.
