Supreme Court asks states to furnish details of encroachment

Taking a serious view of encroachment of forest lands and depletion in forest areas, the Supreme Court on Friday directed all the states to furnish details of those who wrongly claimed forest land as traditional forest dwellers under the Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act. 2006

A three-judge Bench of Justices J. Chelameswar, A.M. Sapre and Amitav Roy gave this direction in a batch of petitions filed by Wildlife Trust of India, Wildlife First and Bombay Natural History Society alleging that the 2006 law had only led to encroachment and a severe depletion in forest areas in the country.

The bench sought details from all states on steps taken to evict those who had under the false pretext of being traditional dwellers sought to arrogate forest land rights to themselves. States will have to reply within two weeks what action they had taken against such encroachers under their laws.

The Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, was enacted to recognise the rights of traditional forest dwellers. Senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for the Trust, cited several CAG reports since 2006 on the state of forests in India based on satellite imagery and sought a performance audit of the implementation of the 2006 Act.

He said that the Act had been implemented in almost every state except Tamil Nadu. He alleged that the high number of rejection of claims only meant that the machinery was not being able to filter the traditional dwe-llers from the encroachers. he said an estimated 20 lakh persons are stated to have occupied forest lands across the country thus causing huge eco imbalance and depletion of massive tracts of forest cover in the country.

Appearing for the Cen-tre, additional solicitor general P.S. Narasimha said the 2006 Act did not have any such eviction mechanism.

He said mostly STs have traditionally lived in the forests. Others are migrants into such areas. “The legal regime to identify traditional dwellers is there, there is implementation and follow-up,” he said.

He said Tamil Nadu is the only state which has so far not implemented the 2006 Act after the Madras High Court stayed its implementation on a plea by a retired state forest officer. The petitioner in the High Court had alleged that forest lands would under the law be grabbed by encroachers. The bench then sought details from all states in two weeks on steps taken to evict those who had under the false pretext of being traditional dwellers sought to arrogate forest land rights to themselves.