Tribal Communities Leverage Geospatial Technologies to Get Their Land Rights Recognised

Overview

Adivasis and other traditional forest dwellers have been living in the forests from times immemorial. Yet their rights over their lands and forests were never properly recognized and recorded during the forest settlement process. This was true not only during colonial rule but also continued after independence. This made them ‘encroachers’ in their homelands and deprived them of the rights and security of tenure over their lands and forests. This is the main reason why they have been living a life of extreme poverty and hunger amid areas rich in forests and other natural resources. This also alienated them from the forests, which is the main reason for forest degradation.

The parliament of India recognized this ‘historical injustice’ and in December 2006 unanimously passed a law titled “The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of) Rights Act, 2006”, known as the Forest Rights Act (FRA). It recognizes two types of rights of Adivasis and other forest dwellers – 1) Individual Forest Rights (IFR) over forest land occupied by them before 2005 and 2) Community Forest Rights (CFR) of village Gram sabhas over forest resources, including the right to protect, regenerate and manage forests for sustainable use.

The implementation of FRA started in January 2008 with much hope and enthusiasm. But most of the claimants could not support their claims with documentary evidence showing that they were in occupation of the claimed lands before December 2005, which is the cut-off date for acceptance of claims. As a result, most of the claims started getting rejected.

ARCH-Vahini has been working with Gram sabhas and Forest Rights Committees (FRCs) of the Narmada district of Gujarat for the proper implementation of the Forest Rights Act.

Vision: To ensure dignified, healthy, and prosperous lives for the Scheduled Tribes and traditional forest dwellers in the country through fair implementation of the Forest Rights Act.

Objectives

y To help manage dynamic situations with pinpoint accuracy concerning affected individuals, available infrastructure, decision making, etc. y To help forecast the spread of the pandemic within defined geographies, thereby helping all stakeholders better prepare for the future.

Stakeholders Involved

The State Tribal Development Department, Government of Gujarat, District-Level Administration, Village-Level Forest Rights Committees, Voluntary/Civil Society Organisations, and Forest Dwellers. Solution and Implementation Plan

The project began by raising awareness among tribal communities about various provisions of the Act and the Rules, providing training to FRC members for various tasks under the Act like filling in claim forms, field verification of claimed lands, taking statements of witnesses, document verification, etc. Despite all these efforts, nearly 70% of the total 17,000 claims of the Narmada district were rejected due to a lack of documentary evidence. Once the rejected claims were reopened by the Government following a petition in the Gujarat High Court, it was decided to use historical Satellite Imageries of 2005 as documentary evidence to prevent such instances in the future.

Printed images from Google Earth were provided to the Forest Rights Committees (FRCs) and they were asked to identify individual farms on the maps, which was done accordingly. This convinced FRCs of the role of satellite imagery in verifying claims.

GPS technology was explored for marking the boundaries of each plot on these maps, which was difficult and prone to errors earlier. This data was superimposed on Google Earth. The area of each plot was also automatically calculated and the condition of each plot in 2005 in terms of whether it was under cultivation or forest was also clearly seen. The process was adopted by more than 200 villages. It was also decided to use imageries from National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad so that questions of authenticity would not be raised.

These maps were presented in the meetings of village Gram sabhas for adopting necessary resolutions recommending approval or rejection of claims and then submitted to Sub Divisional Level and District Level committees as supplementary evidence. The State Government of Gujarat also took note of this development and decided in 2017 to appoint the GEER Foundation of Gandhinagar to independently verify the GPS data submitted by the Gram sabhas. At that time, this was done only for the Narmada district on a pilot basis. In early 2022, the State Government has decided to extend this method to the remaining 13 districts too. Use of Geospatial Technologies

In the first phase, simple hand-held devices like Garmin E-trex-20 were used by FRC surveyors to delineate parcels and calculate areas. The data was then processed on a relatively simple GIS program ExpertGPS, where each parcel was given the plot number and name of the claimant and overlaps/gaps between adjacent