A crucial gram sabha is being organised by the local tribal population to decide the fate of the Mahan forests in Madhya Pradesh. This gram sabha will be along the lines of the gram sabhas held in the Niyamgiri hills, which had said no to bauxite mining. These ancients forests comprising of virgin sal trees have been in the eye of a storm ever since Stage 2 clearance was granted to the Mahan coal block, which would see the destruction of over five lakh hectares of forest. The local tribals, organised under the banner of the Mahan Sangharsh Samiti (MSS), have now girded their loins and are determined to give voice to their anger at losing this last tract of green. “Signatures had been forged in the earlier gram sabha meet held on March 6, 2013. We will not allow this to be repeated a second time over,” said Bechan Lal Shah, a member of the MSS. Singrauli collector M. Selvendran concedes there was “some discrepancy in the signatures in the earlier gram sabha” which is why he instituted an inquiry, whose result “I am still awaiting... but we will hold another gram sabha meet whose recommendations will be forwarded to the state government. Forest land diversion can start only after that.” Rukun, a tribal woman who lives in Budher village located inside the forest, is emphatic that “Our livelihood , our customs and our culture are tied up with our forests.” Ram Lelu Singh Kerhwar, also a resident of Budher, who does agriculture on two acres of revenue land which falls within the forest, said, “When we raised the issue of how our signatures had been forged with our chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, he did not respond to our queries.” Pria Pillai, a Greenpeace campaigner working in Singrauli district, said, “The decision of the gram sabhas in Niyamgiri has set a precedent in terms of the Forest Right Act since 40 per cent of the population in the Mahan forests is tribals.” “There are no individual tribal rights to settle but community rights of grazing and pasture do remain to be settled,” the collector, Mr Selvendran, said. He explained, “We received 20,000 applications for individual tribal rights from which 1,200 are still pending. Forty-five hundred pattas have been given in the district.”