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20 years of Forest Rights Act

15-08-202630 STORIES

In this issue

Soliga family

FOREST RIGHTS ACT

The FRA promise

Two decades after the Forest Rights Act became law, the record is uneven. While the law offers a democratic framework for forest governance, its transformative potential is unrealised due to weak implementation and resistance from bureaucrats.

Sharachchandra Lele

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FOREST RIGHTS ACT

Editor’s note

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FOREST RIGHTS ACT

Takes two to tango

While government records boast large numbers of recognised “community rights” titles, the reality is different. For the FRA to truly succeed, it needs an approach that combines community-led legitimacy with administrative support and clear timelines.

Shruti Mokashi,Sharachchandra Lele

FOREST RIGHTS ACT

Back to the roots

Gram sabhas demonstrate that everyday knowledge of the forest yields better outcomes than top-down ideas driven by a government-knows-best attitude.

Stone seat

FOREST RIGHTS ACT

The governance, rights face-off

Between paper and forest floor, an entrenched bureaucracy, aided by an indifferent political class, has managed to subvert the FRA’s most radical promise of genuinely democratic, grassroots governance of forests.

Siang Valley

Why the FRA matters in Arunachal

Arunachal Pradesh’s refusal to implement the Forest Rights Act leaves indigenous communities whose lives are inextricably linked with its forests vulnerable.

Gautam Aredath,Rajkamal Goswami

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FROM THE SIDELINES

Flash flood

Just when it seemed that democracy had more or less been put to sleep, the earth split and people emerged from cracks, exactly like cockroaches.

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Protest Politics

The cockroaches and the strongman

Modi’s “strongman” politics depends on appearing immune to public pressure, though his record shows repeated tactical retreats when the political stakes become high enough. The CJP protests may become the next major challenge to that governing style.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

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AYODHYA RAM TEMPLE

An unholy mess

The initial SIT report on the Ayodhya Ram temple donation scandal has highlighted the deep rot in the management of one of India’s wealthiest religious institutions.

Ashutosh Sharma

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Deceits, desertions, and the AIADMK

Though Vijay’s rise to power has dealt a body blow to both the DMK and the AIADMK, it is the latter that faces the greater threat, with many of its leaders crossing over to the TVK. How it emerges from this crisis will shape the State’s political course.

Ilangovan Rajasekaran

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Mamata Banerjee’s fight for Trinamool’s identity is more than symbolic

While Mamata wages a battle for the Trinamool’s name and symbol, the ECI faces charges of favouring NDA-aligned factions—bringing the spotlight back on the need for a separate law to eliminate subjectivity and bias in such disputes.

When governments refuse to talk, citizens will

Track II diplomacy by citizens who want to keep the candle burning even when governments are spreading darkness everywhere brings ordinary Indians and Pakistanis together.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

BJP battles Brahmin outrage

The BJP’s Brahmin vote bank in the Hindi heartland is restive, and that could have serious ramifications for the party’s 2027 Assembly election prospects.

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ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES

Can Chinese investment help India’s manufacturing sector?

A strategy that opens India’s doors to Chinese investment to revive its ailing manufacturing sector could prove futile. The alternative is to discipline domestic capital and leverage the country’s vast domestic market.

C.P. Chandrasekhar

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First principles of Track 2 diplomacy

Track 2 meetings do bring a valuable theoretical and methodological understanding to interstate relations, but one must be cautious about classifying them under “diplomacy”.

Seeking equity in a majoritarian society

The principal challenges confronting Indian Muslims now go beyond educational and economic disadvantage to questions of security, equal opportunity, and social acceptance, challenging the constitutional promise of equality and fraternity.

M. Hamid Ansari

Wayanad

Uncertain pauses

As climate change-related disasters become the new normal, these images capture communities whose lives are being broken over and over again and ask what resilience looks like when it is not heroic but helpless.

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THE ETHICAL LIFE

Shameless and powerful

Having captured every institution that might hold him to account, the shameless strongman offends in full view of the public because being seen and going unpunished is itself the demonstration of impunity.

Rajeev Bhargava

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The sacred feminine

Heart of the mater

“One Mother, Many Mother Tongues”, an exhibition co-curated by Naman Ahuja and Andrea Anastasio, celebrates the cult of the mother goddess down the ages, around the world.

Madhulika Liddle

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Hindustani music

The thinking musician: Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande at 75

Here is a musician whose greatest contribution is much more than a raga or a bandish. Rather, he taught us how to have a rich and ongoing dialogue between music and memory, music and imagination, music and curiosity.

A screening of Satluj

Counter Culture

Satluj is a cry for justice

To call the Honey Trehan film a propaganda film is to reduce it to a statistic, to strip it of its ambiguities, its constructed omissions, its fragile dances.

Prathyush Parasuraman

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Political testimony

The audacity of hope

These 31 essays document life in Narendra Modi’s India, told not as abstract political commentary but through the lived experiences of those who have borne the brunt of its policies.

Anand Teltumbde

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Social medicine

Rebuilding a politics of care

Harsh Mander’s latest book supporting public health facilities argues that inequity in access to healthcare is a moral failure, not a funding gap.

Dr Ramani Atkuri

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Violence against women

The quiet cage

Anuradha Kapoor’s study reframes a woman’s birth family as a site of hidden violence, not limited to physical harm but embedded in its everyday control over choices that shape her life.

Dr Christianez Ratna Kiruba

Angel

A dark fragrance

Naveen Kishore’s imagistic poems, playing constantly with chiaroscuro, affect and construct, seem to locate themselves in the liminal spaces of human experience and memory.

A sensory ride through the narrator's mind

Fries, fantasies, foreplay

Kamal Trilok Singh’s debut novel is a dizzying, X-rated journey through the deepest recesses of a broken mind.

The heroine is a rebellious young farmhand

Fresh but flimsy: Reading Gulabiya

The first English translation of the first novel in Angika embodies within itself questions of representation and the politics of language.

Rohini Mokashi Punekar

New books on the shelves

A crime thriller in translation that spans the darkest chapters in indian history, a perspective from the Global South on the decay of democratic norms worldwide, and many more.

Faces

Translated by Janaki Venkatraman

Bava Chelladurai

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‘The Dystopian Times’ by Appupen

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