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Korea (Chhattisgarh), Keonjhar (Odisha): One day in the summer of 2016—Babulal Salaam does not recall the exact date—workers arrived at this Gond tribal’s farm in Thaggaon village of northwestern Chhattisgarh’s Korea district. They began marking boundaries in limestone around his land and pounding in roughly hewn, lemon-yellow cement pillars. “I asked them what were they doing on my land, but they spoke in a language not from here,” Salaam recalled to IndiaSpend. The labourers marked the farmlands of 35-40 households in all, without explanation, according to the village sarpanch, Ashok Kumar.
In the adjoining village of Chhote Salhi, villagers narrated similar accounts. Pannalal Sai recalled the labourers arriving on his land: “’Paudha lagega’ bolay. Kya paudha? Kyon lagega? Rajasthan side ke labour lag rahay thay. Humko aur kuch nahi bataaye. (Trees would be planted, they said. [We asked] what trees, and why? They seemed like workers from Rajasthan. They didn’t tell us anything).”
Salaam, Sai and other villagers eventually gathered that the labourers were marking out their lands on the orders of the district forest department, who planned to fence these in for plantations.
A fierce late-April sun beat down as Sai, a diminutive, soft-spoken man clad in a white shirt and blue-checked lungi, led us out of the family’s cool mud-and-tile home to their land, a rectangular plot of mixed cropping surrounded by a few mahua trees, on which the family grows corn, paddy, sesame, pulses and vegetables through the year. “Land is the basis of our survival,” Sai said, “If the government takes it away for plantations, how will we survive?”
Pannalal Sai and Babulal Salaam are among the scores of villagers who found their lands being forcibly earmarked for compensatory tree plantation in lieu of forests to be stripped for the Parsa coal block. More than 4,000 acres in 16 villages have been earmarked for this plantation project.
In India, projects that necessitate the use of forest areas for non-forest purposes, such as mining and infrastructure projects, are required by law to undertake ‘compensatory afforestation’ (CA) on an equivalent piece of non-forest land, or double the expanse of ‘degraded forest’ land. In the past, forest departments have largely created monoculture plantations of non-indigenous, commercial species such as eucalyptus, acacia and teak under compensatory afforestation projects. The government counts such plantations as forests. The plantation scheme is a component by which the government maintains that it is increasing forests, thus fulfilling a key commitment under the 2015 Paris Climate agreement to counter climate change by creating carbon sinks.
The compensatory afforestation project pitched in Thaggaon, Chhote Salhi and as many as 14 other villages in the area is related to the recent forest ‘clearance’ (permission) awarded by the environment ministry this February to the Parsa coal block in the adjoining Sarguja district’s dense Hasdeo Arand forests, one of India’s finest.
In all, the project is to sweep across more than 4,000 acres, an area larger than 3,000 football fields, in the 16 villages, impacting hundreds of residents--predominantly Adivasis, or indigenous communities, also called scheduled tribes.
Forest and revenue officials have crafted this project despite the fact that most of the lands in question are being used by the village communities for farming, common property usage such as for grazing livestock, gathering mahua, tendu leaf (used to roll thin cigarettes), chaar (chironji, or Cuddapah almond) and other lucrative forest produce. The land also includes parcels that are rocky (“chattan-waali zameen”), where, villagers pointed out, saplings would not survive.
| Table: Compensatory Afforestation Plan For Parsa Coal Block | |
|---|---|
| Village | Land Earmarked for Plantations (Acres) |
| Thaggaon | 497 |
| Chhote Salhi | 121 |
| Baday Salhi | 657 |
| Baday Kalwa | 275 |
| Dhanpur | 291 |
| Pendri | 194 |
| Bodemuda | 269 |
| Jilda | 237 |
| Majhouli | 101 |
| Bari | 560 |
| Mugum | 639 |
| Chopan | 76 |
| Bharda | 50 |
| Khadgawa | 50 |
| Salka | 57.00 |
| Gidmudi | 82 |
| Total | 4161 acres |
Source: Forest clearance documents for the Parsa coal block, Korea District Office
A questionable offset
A tale of two ‘forests’: In Sarguja district's Hasdeo Arand, authorities have awarded preliminary clearance for 1,600 acres of dense forests to be stripped for coal mining. 'Compensatory afforestation’ for this destruction is to take the form of plantations by the forest department in adjoining Korea district.
In Korea district in Chhattisgarh, a forest department plantation of 22,000 trees forms a desolate expanse. The government counts such plantations as forests, and has made them a key component of its international commitments of increasing forest cover to mitigate climate change.
Compensatory afforestation purportedly offsets the loss of forests cleared for industrial, infrastructure or other non-forest projects.
This principle, despite facing serious questions about its efficacy and outcomes, gained heft in 2016, when the Modi government gave it the shape of a law: the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act (CAF Act). The government issued rules for its implementation in August 2018.
To the dismay of Adivasi and other forest-dwelling communities, forest rights groups and opposition political parties, the government brushed aside repeated appeals that the new law be made compliant with the land reforms and decentralised forest governance structures laid down by the landmark Forest Rights Act of 2006, and to ensure that communities in whose villages CAF funds would be deployed would have the right of consent.
In the coming weeks, a fund of Rs 56,000 crore ($8 billion) is set to flow under the CAF Act to state governments’ forest departments. This is money accumulated over the years, based on two components paid into the fund by those who are awarded forest clearance permits: the ‘net present value’ (NPV), or a monetary value put by forest departments to the diverted forest, and the cost of raising plantations on alternative land. Such payments are determined by forest officials, and range from Rs 5,00,000-11,00,000 per hectare, depending on the type and condition of the forest being stripped.
“These huge sums of money are nothing to feel happy about,” a senior Indian Forest Service officer told IndiaSpend, requesting anonymity. “I would call it a kind of blood money – since it reflects how much forests we have lost. And you can never recreate what is being destroyed.”
The challenge, however, is not merely of adequately offsetting loss of forest cover. On the ground, the CAF Act will unleash land conflicts and undermine the resource rights and food security of vulnerable rural communities, particularly Adivasis, our reporting on unfolding projects in Korea, Chhattisgarh and Keonjhar, Odisha shows. These two states are among those that will receive the largest proportion of allocations from the CAF.
A search for land
Over 2014-18, the central environment ministry issued permits to clear 1.24 lakh hectares of forests, according to an analysis by the Centre for Science & Environment. On paper, an equivalent amount of area, or more, has been earmarked for compensatory afforestation. Yet, “Land on such a large scale is hardly lying around just like that,” said Madhu Sarin, a development planner specialising in forest policy and rural communities. “It is all under some use or the other.”
In this land-stressed country, how are the forest departments finding thousands of hectares of land to create plantations? Forest and tribal rights grassroots groups argue that the land is being siphoned off from marginal rural communities, more often than not Adivasis, whose very survival depends on such land.
In November 2017, the environment ministry issued a direction asking states to “create landbanks for compensatory afforestation projects for the speedy disposal of forest clearance proposals.” On May 22, 2019, the ministry further said that in states with over 70% forest cover, compensatory afforestation projects against forest permits need not take place in the same state, but can be housed anywhere in the country, using land banks.
Rural communities say they experience the state’s bid to bank land as a land grab, as IndiaSpend reported on September 19, 2017, in the weeks before the environment ministry issued its 2017 directive.
“Land banks are serving to invisible-ise Adivasi communities,” Gladson Dungdung, an Adivasi author who has written extensively on land banks and forest rights, told IndiaSpend. “In Jharkhand, over 20 lakh acres have been listed in land banks, including common lands, sacred groves and forest lands. People have no clue, and they suddenly find their land and forests being fenced away, cutting off life-giving access for them and their livestock.”
Gladson Dundung (left) during a village meeting on land and forest policies in Khunti, Jharkhand.
The result is “a double displacement”, said Sarin–first for forest clearance, and then for compensatory afforestation.
Parsa coal block’s compensatory afforestation project, which has unfolded over 2016-18, the precise time when the CAF Act and its rules were formed, is a telling example.
“Mahaul garam tha... hungama ho gaya”
In January 2019, the ministry of environment, forests and climate change controversially awarded the Parsa coal block a Stage-I (preliminary or in-principle) forest clearance or permit, setting the ground for stripping 1,600 acres of lush forests for coal mining. The mine has been allotted to the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Nigam, a state-owned power utility, which in turn has appointed Adani Enterprises Ltd as mine developer and operator, in a move some commentators have criticised as opaque.
The clearance was awarded because the state government showed that a mandatory condition had been met: more than 4,000 acres of non-forest land had been identified for compensatory afforestation in 16 villages in the adjoining district of Korea. This created the impression that forest loss in one site would be made up by planting trees in another.
According to a February 2017 letter by the Korea district collector, submitted as part of the forest clearance application, 1,684 hectares (or 4161 acres) of land which were “free of encroachment” had been identified in 16 villages of Korea. The department, the letter continued, had “no objection” to the land being given to the forest department for CA plantations in lieu of the forest being destroyed for the Parsa coal block.
IndiaSpend travelled to eight out of the 16 villages, and heard a common narrative: villagers said that officials had neither formally informed nor consulted them about the afforestation project. And that they were opposed to such a project, since the lands marked for plantations were privately held or common property land, largely their means of survival and food security.
Despite protests by villagers over 2016-18, officials continued with the plan, which became the basis on which the Parsa coal block eventually secured forest clearance.
A half-an-hour drive from Chhote Salhi is Baday Salhi village, where authorities have marked out 657 acres of land for compensatory afforestation. Residents gathering at sarpanch Ruplata Singh’s home recalled to IndiaSpend how attempts by the forest department to put pillars on farms across the village last year had ended in a skirmish. “Mahaul garam tha.. hungama ho gaya (Things heatened up and it turned into a big fight). We eventually chased them out,” the sarpanch said.
Villagers in Baday Salhi said they chased away labourers and officials who tried to put pillars on their lands for the plantation project.
“They put pillars on our land, right where we do our farming, without asking us, without giving us any information,” said Amar Singh, a villager, “Would we not stop them?” Others in the crowd piped in, “When we asked why here, why not elsewhere, they said they have orders and have to put it where the satellite says so.”
Within days, the villagers uprooted the pillars, threw them away, and resumed farming on the lands. Official documents, land maps and GIS depictions, meanwhile, neatly plot the lands earmarked for compensatory afforestation, giving no indication of these ground contests, or how the land is being used currently.
Korea is a ‘scheduled area’ i.e. a tribal-majority area enjoying constitutional protections, and special laws such as the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act. The law states that gram sabhas (village assemblies) have the power to manage their natural resources, and must be consulted on any plans regarding these. However, in every village IndiaSpend visited, residents reported that officials had not presented any details of the compensatory afforestation proposal to the gram sabhas for their approval or inputs. “Sab manmani se kiya (The officials did it arbitrarily),” said Thaggaon sarpanch Ashok Kumar of the plantation project in his village.
In Bodemuda and Dhanpur villages, where the forest department has marked out 558 acres of land for compensatory afforestation, sarpanch Shiv Kumar Singh said villagers had a vague idea of what was going on. “The local forester and patwari [land revenue official] came and told me that trees would be planted on our village’s lands as bharpai (compensation) for the forest that would be destroyed by Adani’s Parsa mine in Hasdeo [Arand] on Sarguja side.”
Kumar said he told the foresters that there was very little fallow land available in the village. Of what was fallow, most of it was rocky, and would not be suitable for plantations. “I told the officials that tree planting is a good thing. But it should happen after proper meetings with our gram sabha, so that we as a village can tell them where appropriate land is available, and what species of trees would be suitable,” he said.
Echoing accounts in multiple villages, Shiv Kumar Singh, sarpanch of Dhanpur, says officials have earmarked agricultural land of villagers for compensatory plantations for the Parsa coal block without informing residents.
In Gidmudi village, former sarpanch and current zila panchayat member Gurujlal Neti said the local patwari and forest beat guard had come to him saying they wanted specific lands in the village for afforestation. “I told them that villagers have been cultivating these lands since a long time, and without their permission, how could authorities take it for plantations?” Neti said, “They needed to approach the villagers formally.” The officials left, Neti said, and he thought the matter had ended.
Neti and other villagers were unaware that despite their opposition, officials had gone ahead with the compensatory afforestation plans.
In Bari, sarpanch Jaipal Singh similarly said the local forester, Nirmal Netam, had come to him and said trees would be planted in the village under a project linked to the Parsa coal block. “He gave me some documents in English, and asked me to sign. I did so, trusting him,” Singh said, adding that he thought the trees would make the village greener. It was only subsequently, when labourers came and began digging pillars on villagers’ farms, that the exact plan revealed itself. “Villagers started to oppose it and threw all the pillars away,” Singh said.
On paper, however, district officials have finalised 560 acres of land in Bari for compensatory afforestation. Singh was unaware that this had happened despite the opposition. “When officials tell us something, we tend to believe them in good faith,” he said. “But actually they should be coming and doing proper meetings with the gram sabha, and sharing all details of any proposal with us formally, and in a language we can understand.”
The plan was unlikely to be implemented smoothly unless the villagers cooperated, Singh said: “They [the officials] did not involve us when they should have, and villagers will hardly give up their agricultural land like this for plantations. Jamke virodh hoga (There will be strong opposition)!”
In fact, according to Dhanpur sarpanch Singh, residents were so troubled by the pillars on their lands that sarpanches from several of the 16 villages got together to meet the then legislator, Shyam Bihari Jaiswal, in December 2016 to lodge a protest. This meeting was covered by the local media. Yet, over 2017-18, ignoring what the local communities were saying, the forest clearance file for the Parsa coal block kept moving ahead in the state government and ministry offices in Korea, Raipur and Delhi.
A December 2016 news report in a local Hindi newspaper reports the villagers’ meeting with the local legislator Shyam Bihari Jaiswal to protest against the compensatory afforestation project on their land.
Renewing a historic injustice
The FRA was enacted to redress a “historical injustice”--to recognise through individual and community titles the customary rights of communities that have traditionally depended on forestlands, but whose ties were denied, and even criminalised, by colonial and post-colonial policies. The CAF Act’s letter and design put it in direct conflict with the Forest Rights Act, activists say, shutting out communities and undermining democracy all over again.
Although enacted more than a decade ago, the FRA remains under-implemented to the extent that a 2017 assessment by the US-based Rights & Resources Initiative showed that just 3% of the minimum potential community forest rights area had been settled through the award of formal titles. Officials have rejected more than 50% of individual and community forest rights (CFR) claims filed by Adivasis and other forest-dwellers. Activists have repeatedly opposed these rejections and even challenged them in court.
“Given that a majority of the land which comes under the Forest Rights Act is yet to be settled, a legislation like CAF poses a serious threat to the pending recognition of people’s rights,” said Tushar Dash, a Bhubaneshwar-based researcher who worked on the RRI study.
The Parsa case demonstrates this. For example, according to the February 2017 ‘no-objection’ letter from the Korea district collector, the over 4,000 acres of land being earmarked for Parsa’s compensatory afforestation project are ‘rajasva van bhumi--chhote baday jhaad ka jungle’, or ‘revenue forest lands, with small and big trees’.
The contradictory nomenclature—i.e., land categorised simultaneously as ‘revenue’ (or under the jurisdiction of the revenue department) as well as ‘forest’ (under the ambit of the forest department)—reflects a deeper mess in the land records of the state revenue and forest departments, as well as outdated land survey settlements. However, the Forest Rights Act applies to all lands categorised as ‘rajasva van bhumi’, officials in Chhattisgarh told IndiaSpend, and communities in possession of such lands and drawing their livelihood from it were entitled to FRA deeds.
Residents of Thaggaon village, Samudribai Salaam, Sonmati Orkera, Sampatiya Salaam and Indukunwar Orkera (left to right), return home after gathering forest produce from the village's forested commons. While Thaggaon is yet to get recognition under the Forest Rights Act for such community forest rights, officials have earmarked 500 acres of land in the village for compensatory plantations.
In all of the eight villages IndiaSpend visited, villagers decried the poor implementation of the Forest Rights Act, and the daunting process of filing claims. “We submit our claims, but it goes up [to officials] and they just sit on it,” said Singh, the Dhanpur sarpanch. “Most of the claims filed are pending or have got rejected.”
In Gidmudi, the zila panchayat member Neti echoed this, saying, “Most villagers are still not fully aware of their rights, and if they are not accompanied by someone assertive, patwaris and foresters find it easy to brush them away, saying this land belongs to the government, and they cannot get FRA titles.” In Thaggaon village, Rameshwar Das, a member of the village Forest Rights Committee, said, “I help so many Adivasi villagers fill up the forms and provide the required documentation. Their claims get rejected on grounds that some document or the other is missing.”
None of the 16 villages have received community forest rights or titles to the forested commons in their villages.
In contrast to the villagers’ accounts, the official documents earmarking land in the 16 villages for compensatory afforestation say there are no pending FRA claims on the land in question. The document notes that FRA titles had been given on 44 acres in the earmarked land–on average, under three acres in each village. By contrast, more than 4,000 acres have been allotted for compensatory afforestation to facilitate the clearance for the mine.
The Congress party was elected to power in Chhattisgarh in December 2018 with a key campaign promise of implementing the Forest Rights Act. This is likely to intensify the CAF-FRA land contests. In the wake of a controversial February 2018 order of the Supreme Court to evict forest dwellers, which is currently on hold, Congress president Rahul Gandhi asked Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel to ensure the law would be properly implemented. He wrote that rights to land, water and forests were integral to the right to life for millions of Adivasis and other forest-dwellers.
