Tribals and rights activists are angered by the prolonged delay in implementing legislation that will secure rights denied to India's indigenous people since British rule and are pressing for immediate notification of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest-Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill 2006

Tribals across India staged demonstrations all over country on December 1 demanding the immediate notification of the controversial and long-delayed legislation that secures their rights over forest land and produce, and an end to other injustices against them.

In the capital New Delhi, several dozen tribals and rights activists championing their cause formed a human chain outside Shastri Bhavan, where the tribal affairs ministry is located. In states like Gujarat, thousands staged protests against the unconstitutional discrimination against them in all the tribal districts.

Currently, the biggest grievance of India's almost 80 million indigenous people is the central government's reluctance to notify the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest-Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill 2006. According to Adivasi Maha Sabha, an umbrella organisation of tribals in Gujarat, despite the Bill being passed "unanimously" several months ago by Parliament, vested interests (read 'environmentalists and the wildlife lobby') are holding up its implementation.

The Act, though not wholly acceptable to tribals, will, for the first time, have corrected several historical injustices meted out to tribals from the days of British rule. But the "forest department is continuing its atrocities on the helpless adivasis, destroying their crops and trying to evict them on the excuse that the Act is still not implemented," the Maha Sabha said in a statement.

"Though the preamble of the Act says that its purpose is to set right the historical injustices done to the adivasis over the years, by not considering their rights, the present non-implementation is betraying its very purpose. In fact, it is perpetuating the injustice it vows to remove. A handful of tiger protectors, who are funded from abroad and also by the government, in crores of rupees, have managed to get a group of Congress leaders belonging to the erstwhile royal families and the elite group to support them against the Act and against the adivasis saying that the tigers will be killed and the environment will be destroyed if the Act is implemented. The paradox is that the same congress MPs and ministers had voted for the Act in Parliament," the Sabha said.

"The tiger lobby did not get any support at that time and the Bill was passed unanimously. But after the Act was passed, these powerful tiger protectors with the support of the forest department started lobbying to stop the Act. What was not possible for them by democratic action in Parliament, they managed to achieve through high-level influence," the statement said.

"The interests of 8 crore adivasis is (being) sacrificed for the benefit of a handful of environmentalists, wildlife activists and of course the forest department in the name of protecting the tigers which are being poached with the support and connivance of the very same forest department. How is it when thousands of hectares of forest are cut down for mines, dams, roads, goldfields and other so-called 'development' projects and handed over to private companies for factories (more than 11,33,000 hectares in the last 27 years) these protectors of wildlife and ecology never opposed any such move," asks the Sabha.

"If, according their logic, implementation of the Forest Rights Act will destroy tigers, how is it that all the tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve disappeared much before the Forest Rights Act was even thought of," say the activists.

Source: ICNS, December 1, 2007
             ANI, December 1, 2007