With half of the claims received for granting land rights to tribals over forest land under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) getting rejected, Jharkhand has came under criticism from the Centre. The rejection rate is particularly baffling since the State houses nearly half of its ST population below poverty line.
The dismal show has come into light in a recent report revealing the status of the FRA rolled out in 2008 across the country. As per the facts gathered, the State has received as many as 1,03,625 claims for forest land from individuals and 3403 from the community by August 31, 2016. Out of that, only 52,573 individuals and 1850 community pattas could be distributed by that time, totaling just 54,423 successful claims.
“A missive from the Centre on the directions of the Prime Minister Office has come to us quoting dissatisfactory allocations of forest land pattas to individual forest dwellers and tribal or other communities claiming to be residing in forests. We are looking into it and proper directions to all the districts would be issued in this regard,” said a senior official of the Welfare Department.
Jharkhand has figured along with six other states which have been marked for their ineffective implementation of FRA, the legislation assuring restoration of land rights of tribes living in forests for generations.
The action has come on the direction of the PMO which, the official claimed, is looking to implement the traditional forest dwellers Act in a campaign mode in all the states, especially where there is considerable presence of tribals.
Besides Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand are the other provinces where implementation of FRA has not been much effective.
“We are also in touch with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and looking for more number of consultations and creating awareness for speedy disposal of the applications coming for land rights. There are certain challenges in place as well and we have been receiving lots of fictitious and fraudulent claims which may be one of the reasons why the distribution of tribal land rights is slow,” added the official requesting anonymity.
The Centre is, moreover, of the view that considerable number of the rejections has been made on wrongful counts and on flimsy grounds.
The State Government claims to have constituted Forest Rights Committees in 29,188 Gram Sabhas where the total 107028 were granted for their implementation.
“Total 54423 titles out of that have been distributed while 25791 claims have been rejected till August 31. In total, 80214 claims have been disposed of which is about 75 per cent of the entire applications received. But it is also true at the same time that percentage of titles distributed over number of claims received is nearly 51 per cent,” said another official.
Figures suggest that the State has been successful in distributing title deeds for 167203.49 acres of forest land thus far since the FRA came into force.