The communique was in response to observations of the Committee on Public Undertakings (2026-27) of the Lok Sabha on NHPC Ltd., which was fretting over not being able to secure the consent of all the affected gram sabhas to divert a forested area for the Teesta-IV hydroelectric power project.
The Committee had suggested that gram sabha consent “from 70-75% of villages should be made sufficient for large hydropower infrastructure projects of national importance”, implying that dissenting gram sabhas could be forced to comply.
The Committee also recommended that compliance with the Forest Rights Act be completed “at the pre-feasibility stage to prevent delays at the Stage-II clearance stage”, and asked the Ministry of Power to pursue the matter with the MoTA and Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC).
This was the context of MoTA’s response, which is in defiance of its constitutional responsibility to guard the Forest Rights Act. In 2006, the government had carved out “all matters, including legislation, relating to the rights of forest dwelling schedule tribes on forest lands” from the subject of forests and allotted them to the MoTA by amending the Government of India (Allocation of Business) Rules 1961, bringing the MoEFCC’s monopoly on forests to a close. The same Rules also divested the MoEFCC of any authority over such subject matters.
Then came the Forest Rights Act 2006, with MoTA as the nodal agency to implement the Act, including issue directions on all matters falling within the law’s purview.
Ministry versus Ministry
When the government notified the FRA Rules in 2008, the MoEFCC considered what the Forest Rights Act would entail. Through a .Since then, the admissibility of all proposals to divert forests for non-forest proposals have been conditioned on complying with the Forest Rights Act and prior informed consent from the concerned gram sabhas. The gram sabhas have also been required to certify compliance, along with the State governments.
In 2013, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this position in the Niyamgiri case, where it held that the Forest Rights Act applies to all projects and that gram sabha consent was mandatory.
Faced with this new impediment, MoEFCC informed all States in 2013 that gram sabha consent for forest diversion “may not be required for projects like construction of roads, canals, laying of pipelines/optical fibres and transmission lines, etc.”, i.e. where linear diversion of “forest land in several villages is involved, unless the recognised rights of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups and pre-agricultural communities are being affected”.
Fortunately, MoTA responded by writing to all States in March 2014 asking their governments to not honour this order as it was not in line with the law and the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The same year, the MoEFCC also gave district collectors the power to allow forest land to be diverted for non-forest use in areas that had been notified as ‘forest’ less than 75 years prior to December 13, 2005, and as having no record of a tribal population under the 2001 and 2011 Censuses.
The very next year, the Prime Minister’s Office overruled MoTA’s objections, to exempting projects under five categories of projects, from obtaining gram sabhas’ consent. The Office also asked the MoEFCC to draft revised guidelines to let district collectors to clear forest diversion. The MoTA insisted this was “illegal” and would encroach on “the jurisdiction of the judiciary and the legislature”.
The MoEFCC also tweaked the Forest (Conservation) Act Rules in 2014 and then in 2017 to allow the district collector to certify that the relevant gram sabhas had consented to a project, in line with the provisions of the Forest Rights Act.
The problem here was that the district collector also heads the district-level committee that checks and recognises individual claims to land under the Act. Soon, allegations of false certificates also surfaced.
Then, in 2019, the MoEFCC said proposals to divert forests need not comply with the Forest Rights Act for “in-principle” stage-I approval and that such compliance is only required for the final approval. In effect, project proponents would have to seek gram sabhas’ consent after they had already committed funds for the project. MoTA opposed this instantly.
The MoEFCC tried to replace the National Forest Policy 1988 — which recognised “the symbiotic relationship between the tribal people and forests” — with a draft National Forest Policy in 2018. MoTA said the draft “disregarded the traditional custodians and conservatives of the forests” and gave “thrust to increased privatisation, industrialization and diversion of forest resources for commercialisation”.
In one 2008 case challenging the Forest Rights Act’s constitutionality, MoTA abstained from arguing in court. The court decided to order the eviction of claimants under the Act whose claims had been rejected in February 2019; but the order was subsequently kept on hold at the MoTA’s behest when faced with mass protests.
MoTA backs off
The tide turned in 2021, when the MoEFCC and MoTA buried their hatchets and announced a “paradigm shift from working in silos to achieving convergence between Ministries and Departments”. The decision effectively replaced a 2015 MoTA guideline outlining a procedure for gram sabhas to freely develop plans to protect, conserve, and manage the forests under their purview — called community forest resources — with a bureaucratic takeover that included the State forest departments.So when the National Conservation Authority demanded that nearly 4 lakh forest-dwellers be moved out of 54 tiger reserves in June 2024, it did so without mentioning the consent of the gram sabhas. In the same spirit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, chairing a meeting last month, emphasised that delays in infrastructure projects have implications beyond escalating costs: because they also defer the benefits intended for businesses and the wider economy.
The events of today — including the Committee on Public Undertakings proposing that the consent of a supermajority of gram sabhas should suffice in place of the consent of all the relevant gram sabhas — is perhaps the logical but also considerably unfortunate next step on the Indian government’s weakening of the rights of forest-dwellers, in favour improving the ease of doing business.
MoTA has officially stated time and again in the last few years that the Forest Rights Act is a matter for State governments — a position that the MoEFCC has assumed with regards to complying with the Act vis-a-vis the diversion of forests and the ‘protection’ of tigers. Overall, the country has seen fit to undermine the Act altogether rather than fine-tune other forest-related laws to fall in line.
C.R. Bijoy examines natural resource conflicts and governance issues.