14 July 2019


Following the Supreme Court’s recent interventions in the Forest Rights Act (FRA) case, a flood of responses from social activists and academics are on display. We sympathize with the genuine social activists among them, who have fought for years for what they perceive to be their primary mission: to distribute all remaining forests and other ‘cultivable wastelands’ to rural communities to promote agriculture or intensive, market-linked forest product and biomass extraction. Nor do we dispute the activist’s contention that such a land-use policy would — at least temporarily — mitigate some economic hardships faced by its beneficiaries.

We, however, strongly disagree with their basic premise that such forest conversion and intensified exploitation is beneficial to wildlife recovery and nature conservation. Massive scientific evidence, both globally and within India, clearly demonstrate that human colonization has been a major driver of habitat loss and species extinctions. This evidence for global modification of nature by hunter-gatherers spreading out of Africa, goes back over 60,000 years. In the centuries that followed, initially aided by simple tools like fire, axe and the plow and later by modern technology humans succeeded in increasing the capacity of land to support their populations at densities hundreds of times higher, all at the expense of wild nature. 

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