In forest rights push, Centre sanctions over 300 FRA cells to ‘facilitate' implementation

The Hindu

2 days ago

In a first since the Forest Rights Act (FRA) came into being in 2006, the Union government has started funding structural mechanisms to 'facilitate' the implementation of the law meant to give forest rights to Scheduled Tribes and forest-dwelling communities. Implementation of the FRA, for the last 19 years, has been solely the domain of State and union territory governments.
Under the Dharti Aba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyaan (DAJGUA), a Central scheme, the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs has so far sanctioned the setting up of 324 district-level FRA cells across 18 States and union territories implementing the forest rights law. In addition, State-level FRA cells have been sanctioned for 17 of these States and union territories.
The rules governing the operation of these cells flow from the DAJGUA programme and not the principal legislation of the FRA - The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006. This law mandates the State government to set up the structure for processing forest rights claims, which includes Gram Sabha Forest Rights Committees (FRCs), Sub-Divisional Level Committees (SDLCs), District Level Committees (DLCs), and State Monitoring Committees.
Activists' concern
With the new FRA cells being set up through the DAJGUA programme, forest rights activists and experts have raised concerns of this being a 'parallel FRA mechanism outside of FRA's purview'.
A government official told The Hindu, 'These FRA cells will have no role in interfering with decisions made by the Gram Sabha, Sub-Divisional Level Committees, District Level Committees, or State government departments under the FRA. They will merely assist claimants and Gram Sabhas to prepare all paperwork for the FRA claims and assist with data management'.
The DAJGUA was launched in October 2024 and brings together 25 interventions of 17 line ministries for targeted implementation in over 68,000 tribal-dominated villages. One component of the DAJGUA programme is to speed up FRA implementation.
The operational guidelines for DAJGUA mandate the FRA cells to help with 'quick disposal' of pending claims, especially ones that have been held up even after the District Level Committees' approval. According to the last available progress report from March 2025, 14.45% of the 51.11 lakh FRA claims across 21 States/union territories remain pending. Of the around 43 lakh claims that have been disposed of, over 42% were rejected.
The highest number of district FRA cells sanctioned so far has been in Madhya Pradesh, where 55 have been approved. This is followed by 30 in Chhattisgarh, 29 in Telangana, 26 in Maharashtra, 25 in Assam, and 24 in Jharkhand. Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand are among the States with the least FRA pendency, but in Assam, over 60% of claims are pending and in Telangana, around 50.27% claims are pending.
While the rules framed under the DAJGUA mandate the FRA cells to operate under the State government's machinery, the cells themselves are being funded by the Centre through Grants-in-aid General, as per sanction orders for some of them in States like Assam, Himachal Pradesh, and Odisha, seen by The Hindu. The guidelines provide a budget of ₹8.67 lakh for each FRA cell at the district level, and ₹25.85 lakh for each State-level FRA cell.
Significant departure
This marks a significant departure from how Union governments have handled the issue of FRA implementation ever since the law was framed. So far, when confronted with the question of forest rights in Parliament, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs has maintained that the implementation was mandated 'primarily' to States and that it keeps 'exhorting' all governments to abide by the law.
Apart from this, the Tribal Affairs Ministry has traditionally restricted itself to funding training and capacity-building programmes for State government officials at the centre of the FRA implementation, issuing advisories and missives to State governments, and compiling monthly progress reports on FRA data sent by the States.
The DAJGUA guidelines clearly spell out that the FRA cells will deal with all matters of FRA implementation 'as directed' by the State Tribal Welfare departments and district administrations and that it will help both claimants and Gram Sabhas to prepare the claims paperwork for presentation to the Forest Rights Committees.
This includes gathering evidence, certificates, Gram Sabha resolutions and putting together a claims file; assisting the Gram Sabha in conversion of forest and un-surveyed villages and habitations into revenue villages; completing demarcation of forest lands already vested to claimants; facilitating the digitisation of records and their feeding into the relevant portals.
While this is the first time such FRA cells are being proposed by the Union government to speed up FRA implementation, the Odisha government has been using a similar mechanism for a couple of years now that operated as facilitators from outside of the statutory structure that processes FRA claims, according to forest rights researcher Tushar Dash.
'But the response to such a system has been mixed so far. There are concerns that many of the tasks assigned to the FRA cells already come under the functions of statutory committees set up under the FRA leading to confusion at the ground level on who to approach for what,' Mr. Dash told The Hindu.
He further explained that creating more committees or cells 'will not address the structural problems in implementing the FRA'. 'It is known that a large reason for pending claims is that Sub-Divisional Level Committees and District Level Committees don't meet to decide on claims as often as they should. Secondly, there is the problem of Forest departments sitting on claims even after the approval of the DLCs,' Mr. Dash said.