The Land Portal Foundation and the NRMC Center for Land Governance are partnering with key organizations to hold a series of three webinars on women’s Inheritance right to land in India, forest rights and governance and urban tenure leading up to the third annual India Land and Development Conference (ILDC), which will take place from 12-14 March, 2019. The results of these webinars will inform discussions at respective panel sessions during the conference with the aim of making panel-conversations more nuanced, while also diving deeper into the subject, thereby achieving more actionable results. The ultimate goal of these webinars is to contribute to desirable changes in institutional frameworks and to eliminating barriers that are limiting implementation of legal and policy frameworks, through enhanced awareness and understanding of stakeholders. In addition, these webinars will connect local and global discourse and audiences, with the immediate outcome of enhanced appreciation of the issue and more informed actions that contribute to better results.
The webinar on Forest Rights and Governance in India will take place on 30 January from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM IST (1:30-3:00 PM CET or 7:30-9:00 AM EST). The webinar is co-organized by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) with support from the NRMC Center for Land Governance and the Land Portal Foundation
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006, popularly known as Forest Rights Act (FRA) has been widely recognised as one of the landmark legislations in the post-independent India. The FRA recognises historical injustice meted out to scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers and sought to restore the rights of forest dwelling communities over land and the governance & management of forests through decentralisation of power to Gram Sabha. However, over the last decade, the implementation of the FRA has not been effective, as only 17 percent of the total potential forest area has been recognised under forest rights. Also, over these years, there is a large-scale variation in implementation of FRA in all the major states. Nonetheless, FRA has the potential to bring about radical changes in forest governance, including by conferring Community Forest Resource rights and management authority to forest-dwelling communities.
The objective of this interactive and dynamic webinar is to discuss why has there been variation in the implementation of the Forest Rights Act, to identify institutional bottlenecks to up-scaling its implementation, as well as lessons learned from existing best practices
This webinar is part of the global campaign to close the gap between policy and practice in women’s land rights.
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