The Forest Rights Act

The Forest Rights Act represented a historic step forward for forest management in India, and it is often hailed as such. However, it did not emerge from struggles for the control over forests alone, but was a product of an ongoing intersection between political conflict, features of Indian capitalism, and the conceptions of “environment” and “development” in India’s political discourse. In that sense, it is not only an “environmental” legislation, but an economic and social one, and one that belongs to a particular political conjuncture, representing both its limitations, and more importantly, its liberatory possibilities. This paper looks at the FRA in this context and explores how it grew out of this kind of politics, being marked both by the constraints of this period, and by the spaces it created for genuinely new conceptions and processes of development.