Tribes and Forest: Securing Forest Rights and Livelihoods of Tribals

Nearly 10.4 million tribes live in India, making up 8.6 percent of the country's total population and adding to its overall size by more than 15%. The tribe is extremely closely related to the forest, and they depend on the available forest resources for their survival and food. Government policymakers are forced to transform forest land into massive companies that once again move ahead to the indigenous people from their soils due to the continual drive for economic growth and market pressure on the government. Since the colonial era, forest policies have endangered indigenous members' rights to the forest and ignored their input when laws were being drafted. During the colonial era, the government took control of the right to manage the woods from the communities' hands. The postcolonial law has given tribal people a special status, but without comparable or better advancement in the law and administration in other areas, such as land acquisition, development-induced disarticulation, and political independence, it will not be able to address the issues with tribal people's human rights and means of subsistence.