Upscaling Community Tenure Rights in India (Phase III)
Ongoing
From:
01/01/2023
To:
31/12/2025
Budget:
2,600,000 USD
Proponents:
Indian School of Business (ISB)
Vasundhara
Society for Rural, Urban and Tribal Initiative (SRUTI)
Stakeholders:
Tribal/Indigenous Peoples and Other Traditional Forest Dependent Communities and approximately 2 million forest dependent people.
17900 communities
Between January 2018 and June 2022, partners have filed over 6500 claims covering 0.8 million hectares and secured over 1200 titles, covering nearly 0.2 million hectares. The partners have the experience, knowledge, tools and influence to not only further efficiencies in the processes of asserting forest rights but also support the conversion of claims to titles.
To read a brief overview of India, click here.
For a timeline of land and forest rights in India, click here.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
This project follows on the learning and foundation for upscaling rights of two previous project phases. India’s Forest Rights Act, 2006 provides the regulatory space for communities to claim tenurial rights over forests that they have customarily occupied and/or used. In the last 14 years however, only a small fraction of eligible communities have secured their tenurial rights. Of an estimated potential of 40 million hectares, rights have been recognised on only about 4.6 million hectares, involving over 100,000 communities.
Slow progress has been attributed to multiple factors including complex and cumbersome processes that are challenging for communities to navigate without support and limited capacity of, and support for local administrators to fulfil their roles.
This project will focus on addressing these barriers and setting the stage for accelerated as well as extensive rights recognition in India.
GOAL
To substantially expand secure community tenure over forests across large contiguous areas in India to enable sustainable forest governance, strengthen community institutions, and increase livelihood security.
ACTIONS
- Thousands of Community Forest Resource Rights’ claims will be filed across nine states in India with a focus on four key states, namely, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha.
- A technology stack for building efficiency and effectiveness of rights recognition and post-recognition governance will be further developed, and an app for improving efficiency in claims filing deployed in multiple districts.
- Community Forests and/or Community Claimed Forests will be delineated and displayed on publicly accessible mapping platforms.
- A Tool-kit to guide responsible investment and/or sourcing strategies involving tenure secure community forests will be developed and tested.
Expected Results
- Significant increase the area of secure community forest tenure
- Mainstream security of tenure as a business consideration in forest-based investments and supply chains for several commodities.
- Contribute to radical transparency of the forest economy
IMPACT
Tens of thousands of hectares of forest and/or land will be secured or protected by the end of the project, and thousands of communities will directly benefit from the project by its end.
