Indian Forest Rights Act

Description

From Silke Helfrich's Commons Festival:

"INDIA 2006 – 2013 –> In 2006 the Forest Rights Act (FRA) was enacted in almost all of India as an instrument to secure community rights over ancestral lands, forest resources, and customary territories of tribes and other traditional forest-dwelling communities. Notably, these rights are heritable but not alienable or transferable. The radical transformative potential of the FRA has hardly been met since its implementation, but wherever there have been proactive organizations or officials, progress has been made: over 1 million acres have been recognized as community forest resource rights, much of this in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Odisha; and communities are beginning to use the FRA provisions to stop or resist destructive ‘development’ projects as for instance the POSCO steel plant and Vedanta mining proposals in Odisha or a governmental timber logging project in Madhya Pradesh." (http://commonsblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/recent-landmarks-in-the-growing-commons-movement/)