India gives tribal villages rights over forest land and its produce but the laws have been poorly implemented. A union of villages in Maharashtra is now using them to guard their green cover and monetise the produce, which has arrested migration from villages
Roli Srivastava
Amita Madavi stands in the forest that her village is trying to protect from a mining project in Zendepar, Maharashtra. Roli Srivastava/The Migration Story
ZENDEPAR, Maharashtra: Amita Madavi, 38, doesn’t break a sweat as she briskly walks uphill into the forest in her central Indian village, expertly identifying the herb that can cure a cough, the pointy leaf that works wonders as a healing bandage for a sprain and the mushrooms that taste divine. The forest is the lifeline of villagers, who are now preparing for a court battle to protect it from a mining project.
Zendepar, a tiny hamlet of 300 residents, is the latest village in Korchi taluka (cluster) in the lushly wooded Gadchiroli district to exert its legal right on forest land. It has ventured to do this on the back of rare wins scored in recent years by neighbouring villages—victories that were extracted by tapping into decades-old Indian laws which enshrine these rights but have remained poorly understood and implemented.
In 2017, over 90 villages like Zendepar came together, forming a union of sorts called the Maha Gram Sabha or Federation of Villages. The collectivising has given them not just numerical strength but also awareness of their right to stake a claim on the trees and rocks they have co-existed with for generations but had no ownership of until the laws kicked in.
“We don’t have temples and idols. We are adivasis (tribals); we worship our trees and rocks. Our trees and animals live with us. Nature is our god,” said Madavi, as she paused at a landing where a rock sat under a canopy of dried leaves. This revered god of the small village is the spot where villagers congregate annually for a ‘yatra’ (pilgrimage) to the ‘devasthan’ (God’s place) on the top of the hill.
Madanlal Ghani Ram Porethi, head of the Padtiyal Job gram sabha sits in a community hall the village constructed from the compensation money it won for the land used for erecting electric transmission towers in Padtiyal Job village, Maharashtra. Roli Srivastava/The Migration Story
“The entire village depends on the jungle for its living. We get more produce from the forest than from our farms. We sell the produce and also eat it. Our air and water is clean because of our forest. Jungle hai toh hum hain (We owe our existence to the forest),” Madavi told The Migration Story.
‘Game-changer’ laws
Over 100 million people, or nearly eight percent of India’s population, are tribal, most of them marginalised, often cut off from public facilities and even connectivity. Government data shows that in many cases this is because of their location in forests and hills. Two pro-tribal legislations—the Forest Rights Act of 2006 and the earlier Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, or PESA—were enacted with a view to “undoing the historical injustice” tribal communities have suffered.