BHUBANESWAR: The State Government’s directive to all district Collectors to review the forest rights claims, which were filed under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 but rejected at different forums, seems to have been ignored.
Even as the total number of rejected claims under FRA is not available, informed sources said nearly 14,000 applications have been turned down by district level committees. As many as 5,373 claims by Scheduled Tribes and 8,478 claims by Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (OTFD) were rejected in the State.
The highest number (3,346) of rejections at the district level committee was reported from Ganjam district for Scheduled Castes while among the OTFD, as many as 3,294 claims were rejected in Balangir.
When the State Government claims that it has been implementing the FRA expeditiously in a mission mode with convergence of livelihood development and social security-based programmes, only 73 applicants out of 64,145 have been given rights over forest land.
Only three districts have given individual forest right (IFR) to 73 OTFDs. While 47 out of 2,482 claimants in Malkangiri received land titles, 15 and 11 persons were issued the same in Angul and Rayagada districts respectively.
Though the State Government claimed to have distributed 4,25,563 IFR titles till December, 2018, demarcation of land has been completed in 2,99,471 cases.
Seven districts where more than 5,000 titles have been distributed, the performance on demarcation of titles is significantly below the State average, sources said.
The seven districts are Keonjhar, Nabarangpur, Koraput, Sundargarh, Deogarh , Nuapada and Ganjam.