Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Are missing palm trees causing more lighting deaths in Bihar appearing in ‘The Times of India’ dated 29.05.2025". The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Are missing palm trees causing …
Beyond Jethiabhai Basawa’s mud house in the foothills of Aravali extends a 75-hectare patch of barren land. It was once lush bamboo forest worth Rs 9 lakh. After joining the JFM programme in 1996, his village Munkapada in Rajpipla district had nurtured it in the hope of making some money. …
Andhra Pradesh is the only state that claims to have calculated exact timber and bamboo revenue shares transferred to communities under JFM. The World Bank funded the programme with generous loans of Rs 1,000 crore for 15 years till March 2009. Benefits shared are impressive. According to the World Bank’s …
The concept of JFM is alluring enough to keep people engaged in conservation for years. But when it comes to sharing the fruits it is a practical joke. For every hundred rupees earned from timber sale a JFM committee usually gets only Rs 17.5 in cash, thanks to the forest …
The JFM programme faces existential crisis. On the one hand, pieces of legislation like the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, and the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996, have come into existence, giving rights to tribals and forest dwellers over forest resources and their management. On the other …
Forest departments across the country owe millions of rupees to communities. For 20 years communities toiled under the Joint Forest Management programme in the hope of getting shares in revenue from timber and bamboo sales. As forests mature for harvesting, forest departments apply mathematical tricks to bring down monetary share …
The purpose of this assessment is to identify the constraints to and opportunities for women‘s participation in REDD+ initiatives, particularly as country REDD+ readiness plans are being developed, as well as to reveal the potential impacts of gender relations on REDD+ initiatives and vice versa. Additionally, this study aimed to …
The fresh cool forest breeze and the greenery appears to act as a magic wand on the residents of village Ghati. Middle-aged men and women who just a few minutes ago had been involved in hard-core legal talk suddenly speak like children. Forty-something Gyaneshwar Sahare, who had been pouring forth …
Gadchiroli in Maharashtra may have acquired the model district status for clearing a record number of community forest rights (CFR) claims, but its 298 villages are angry with the forest department for stripping them of the basic right to manage forest produce. http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/forest-department-s-cheat-act
GADCHIROLI in Maharashtra may have acquired the model district status for clearing a record number of community forest rights (CFR) claims, but its 298 villages are angry with the forest department for stripping them of the basic right to manage forest produce. The department has also burdened them with conditions, …
Establishing claims of tribals on their land is the essential prerequisite for effective implementation of any land reform, tribal affairs minister Kishore Chandra Deo told FE. He clarified that for the implementation of the proposed land acquisition law or even the Mines and Minerals Development and Regulatory Authority Bill, claims …
The Odisha government is considering setting up an eco-tourism park in the Manchabandha Reserve in Baripada territorial forest division. A project for wildlife conservation in the area is also in the pipeline, forest department sources said. Nearly 822 hectares of lush green forest area has been earmarked for the projects. …
This paper reviews three leading forest sector policy approaches relevant to benefit-sharing for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+): payments for ecosystem services, also known as payments for environmental services (PES), participatory forest management (PFM), and forest concession revenue-sharing arrangements. A survey is made of these three approaches …
This response to the comment “Protecting India’s Protected Areas” by Praveen Bhargav and Shekar Dattatri (23 April 2011) points out the authors’ misreading of the Forest Rights Act and also of the report of the Joint Committee on the FRA.
This paper seeks to understand whether decentralized management of forests can reduce forest loss in developing countries. In South Asia, large-scale experiments in decentralization -- Joint Forest Management in India and community forestry in Nepal, in particular - have changed the relationship between forests, the forest departments and rural households. …
The Integrated Land and Ecosystem Management Project is being implemented by the Forest Department in Madhya Pradesh with the cooperation of Global Environmental Facility. The project is being implemented in nine forest divisions of Betul, Chhindwara, Umaria, Sidhi and Singrauli districts. The five-year project will be implemented till the year …
BHUBANESWAR: Orissa's 11,000-odd Joint Forest Management (JFM) committees, vested with the responsibility of protection of forests through a community-based approach, may soon cease to exist. If these bodies are not made compliant to Forest Rights Act (FRA) that is. Since the Forest Rights Act, 2006 gives gram sabhas the ultimate …
A National seminar on the FRA was organised by the Council for Social Development on 26–27 April, 2010. Most of the participants reported that all of the key features of this legislation have been undermined by a combination of apathy and sabotage during the process of implementation. In the current …
THE Union government is reviewing its landmark initiative, the Forest Rights Act, four years after enacting it. The aim is to find how to strengthen the law which was legislated to ensure the traditional rights of 100 million forest dwelling people in the country. Two high-level groups submitted their assessment …
