By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Jan 15 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Forest dwellers in Kashmir are pinning their hopes on the implementation of a 14-year-old law to save their land and homes, as the government announces plans to evict tens of thousands of people it says are encroaching on protected land.
Last month, the forest department of the Indian-administered territory published a list of about 63,000 people it says are living and farming illegally on a total of 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of forest land.
Now the tribal communities living in the region’s forests are looking for protection under India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006, which is coming into effect in the region more than a decade after it was enacted elsewhere in India.
Zahid Parwaz Choudhary of the Jammu and Kashmir Gujjar Bakarwal Youth Welfare Conference said the law would ease the persecution of tribal communities, which rights campaigners say has intensified under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party.
“If the FRA was implemented in Jammu and Kashmir earlier, we would not have seen the eviction of dozens of families and the harassment of hundreds of families,” said Choudhary, who presides over the nonprofit working for tribal rights.
The FRA aimed to recognise the rights of at least 150 million indigenous and rural people to inhabit and live off about 40 million hectares of forest land.
Mostly concentrated in or near forests, Kashmir has a tribal population of about 1.1 million, according to the latest census carried out in 2011.
