WhatsApp updates form part of Maharashtra govt’s unique approach to find beneficiaries

Nearly 40,000 tribal farmers participated in a 180-km ‘long march’ from Nashik to Mumbai in March seeking implementation of the FRA. (File photo)

For about four months now, 30 WhatsApp groups administered by officials at the Integrated Tribal Development Project, Ghodegaon, with a few hundred members including district collectors, talathis, block development officers, taluka-level officials and village sarpanches have seen thousands of updates posted, including photographs of themselves meeting forest-dwelling families who are either cultivating forest land or living on it. All messages on these groups are updates on efforts to implement the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006.

The WhatsApp updates are part of a pilot project in the 47 talukas of Pune, Satara, Sangli and Kolhapur districts, where officials are racing to complete extensive ‘Forest Rights Surveys’. The concept is a unique flipping of the process under FRA — instead of waiting for forest-dwellers to make claims, as stipulated by the law, the pilot project envisions a proactive state apparatus that locates probable beneficiaries, explain to them their rights, then follows the due process and certifies the rights.

“The idea is to conduct a survey of all forest land in villages, see whether anybody cultivates these lands or lives on them or accesses the forest produce,” says Yogesh Khandare, a tribal inspector at ITDP Ghodegaon who has for six months now been working solely on implementing the FRA. “The aim is to not ask the beneficiary of the law to make an application, but to find him and do it for him.”

ITDP Ghodegaon Project Director Ayush Prasad says the idea stemmed from the understanding that the FRA, actually the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, a legislation that grants forest-dwelling communities Individual Forest Rights (IFR), or legal titles to land they have been tilling since before 2005, does not offer any new right. Instead it merely certifies an existing right. Prasad says, “The FRA is a backward looking law, a finite law. It is theoretically possible to set an end date for implementation of FRA, because no new right is being created.” He has taken it up as a mission to recognise all possible FRA claims in these four districts, and declare the districts 100 per cent FRA compliant, with a certainty that no fresh claimants will emerge subsequently.

Together, the four districts could see potentially 4,40,000 hectares of Community Forest Rights. The programme targets both Individual Forest Rights (IFR) claims for land titles and Community Forest Rights (CFR) for villages’ access to forest produce, community management of forests, etc.

The idea of 100 per cent compliance, slow to take root, is gathering pace. There are posters and videos in Marathi across these districts. Pune’s Divisional Commissioner Deepak Mhaisekar released a video-recorded message instructing officials to participate in the Forest Rights Survey. On August 31 and then again on September 5 and October 2, officials observed a ‘Van Mitra Mohim Divas’, when hundreds of villagers gathered with their FRA claims and the hurdles in obtaining the land title.

Khandare toured the four districts extensively, training officials, pushing for formation of the Forest Rights Committees (FRC). He was joined later by two interns, Paul Fernandes and Deepti Singnarpi, both Masters in Social Work students at TISS, Mumbai. By September end, at least 30 block level training sessions had been held, benefiting 2,600 villages. Khandare, Fernandes and Singnarpi made phone calls and unannounced visits to dozens of officials, explaining the need to do the survey to implement the law. “The surveys drew in claims from from those who are eligible but not able to file a claim for some reason. Instead of just clearing pending cases, this is an attempt to ensure rights to every eligible person,” says Fernandes.

ITDP Ghodegaon’s project is probably the most ambitious effort within the state government’s Van Mitra Mohim, announced soon after Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis made a promise to nearly 40,000 tribal farmers who participated in a 180-km ‘long march’ from Nashik to Mumbai this March seeking implementation of the FRA. Fadnavis’s assurance was that their grievances would be resolved in six months. While implementation lags far behind that target for September, statewide campaigns such as the ITDP Ghodegaon initiative have borne some fruit.

When they started, fewer than 5 per cent of villages in the Pune division had FRCs. Pune’s District Level Committee was not even in existence.

“There was high pendency of cases because the Forest Department would not participate in the verification process as required by law. In fact in one case a senior forest official flatly said he would not recognise grazing rights on forest land,” says R Lande of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, the RSS’s wing working in tribal areas and one of a handful of NGOs participating in the Van Mitra Mohim. “This campaign forced them to participate.”

Yogesh Koli of the Adivasi Kalyan Van Sanvardhan Sanstha working in Sangli said the results are slowly becoming apparent. “In Miraj and Kavathe-Mahankal, 10 Forest Rights Committees (FRCs) have now been formed,” he says, a far cry from officials’ previous stand that Sangli district has no forest land. Similarly, in Rajgurunagar taluka in Pune, all 95 villages that have forest land now have FRCs.

Admittedly, however, the results of these initiatives are still to translate into progress data. Since the start of the Van Mitra Mohim in the summer of 2018 until October 15, according to data compiled by the Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) in Pune, 6,445 claims and appeals have been accepted by sub-divisional level committees (SDLCs) and 18,056 by District Level Committees (DLCs). Including rejections, as many as 34,648 applications have been processed by DLCs, 19,743 by SDLCs — a sizeable chunk of the pending cases.
“Since the CM’s announcement that pending cases would be cleared, we have cleared an aggregate of nearly 54,000 cases, including claims and appeals. Many complicated cases were among these. This is a big step, nearly 78 per cent of pendency has been tackled,” says Manisha Verma, principal secretary of the Tribal Development Department.

Overall, however, data until the end of September shows that only a little over 30 per cent of the 3,60,000-odd IFR claims received since 2008 have been accepted by DLCs, the final tier of the approvals process. The problems of widespread rejection of claims by the sub divisional level committees continues. Of the 3,06,494 claims received by SDLCs until September 21, as many as 1,70,917 or 55 per cent were rejected.

But officials say the qualitative impact of the campaign is tremendous. “We have created sensitisation at the SDLC and DLC levels, given a push to collectors,” says Verma. “The chief secretary, myself, the Forest Department, the TRTI and others have been reviewing the Collectors repeatedly. As many as 134 FRA coordinators, a cadre of trained people who work at block or SDLC or DLC level, have been prepared who will continue the good work.” Also. for IFR claimants, she says, the government will not only ensure patta distribution but will also work on land development to improve credit access and income alternatives for those granted IFR claims. Another big win in the campaign is that data digitisation has begun and data cleaning is almost complete.

Back at Ghodegaon, Prasad and Khandare say the proactive approach has helped overcome hurdles that recur commonly, such as the absence of caste certificates. “In Rajgurunagar, 1000 caste certificates are ready, some already distributed. The process of social audits for giving caste certificates is also being pushed,” says Prasad.

Those working on the project say the campaign has helped turned the implementation of the law into a people’s movement. “The involvement of the sarpanch, Forest Rights Committee members and villagers empower the people,” says Fernandes. Officials agree, insisting that the results will reflect in the data soon enough.

At a glance

3,60,452 | Total IFR claims received in Maharashtra since the FRA was enacted till September 21, 2018
1,14,432 | Total claims accepted by DLCs till September 21
1,22,043 | Total IFR appeals received by DLCs until September 21
55,609 | IFR Appeals accepted by DLCs
24,184 | IFR appeals sent back to SDLCs