A national report on community forest rights under Forest Rights Act: status & issues
This study aims at consolidating information on Community Forest Right (CFR) status and issues in different states in India collected from groups and organizations working in the states including the lessons from the March 2012 consultation, in order to understand the ground level situation regarding their implementation and to provide an assessment based on the collected information about the same.CFR provision of the Act is extremely important for supporting community forest governance and conservation where it is already happening, and also for situations where communities are willing to take up conservation and management of their common resources. Despite the potential of CFR provision, it has been noticed that there has been an emphasis only on a few provisions of the Act rather than the Act in its entirety. The thrust of the implementation in most parts of the country so far has been on claiming individual rights to land while rights over community forest resources (CFRs) have been largely ignored.