Land, forest and resource rights for the social sector

Why these laws belong together

A family in a forest village can hold land under four different kinds of paper, or under none. Its fields may be recorded in the revenue record of rights, its house plot may have no record at all, its cultivation inside a reserved forest may be recognised only by a Forest Rights Act title, and its grazing and gathering may depend on a community forest resource title held by the gram sabha. When a mine, a dam, a road or a protected area arrives, the protection the family has depends on which of these papers it holds and which law the government uses to take the land.

The laws in this guide answer different questions. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (the LARR Act) decides how the government takes land and what it pays. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (the FRA) decides who has rights in forest land at all. The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) and the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution decide how much say the gram sabha has in Scheduled Areas. The forest conservation law, renamed the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam in 2023, decides when forest land may be used for anything other than forest. Land records decide what a family can prove, and so which of the other protections it can claim.

Land acquisition under the 2013 Act

The LARR Act (Act 30 of 2013, assented to on 26 September 2013) replaced the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 and has been in force since 1 January 2014. It applies when the government acquires land compulsorily for a public purpose, including land it acquires for private companies and public-private partnerships.

1. Affected families are defined widely. Section 3(c) counts as affected the family whose land is taken, and also agricultural labourers, tenants, sharecroppers and artisans who worked in the area for three years before the acquisition, forest dwellers who lose rights recognised under the FRA, and families whose livelihood for three years depended on forests or water bodies, such as gatherers of forest produce and fisher folk. Families without title are therefore entitled to rehabilitation and resettlement, and a survey that lists only landowners is incomplete.
2. Consent for private and PPP projects. The proviso to section 2(2) requires the prior consent of at least 80% of affected families where land is acquired for a private company, and at least 70% for a public-private partnership. The families counted for consent are those whose land is acquired and those holding land assigned to them by government under a scheme (sub-clauses (i) and (v) of section 3(c)). Consent is to be taken along with the social impact assessment. Acquisitions for the government's own projects need no consent.
3. Social impact assessment first. Section 4 requires the government to consult the panchayat or municipality and carry out a social impact assessment (SIA), to be completed within six months. The SIA must assess whether the project serves a public purpose, how many families will be displaced, whether the land sought is the bare minimum, and whether another site was considered. Section 5 requires a public hearing in the affected area. Section 7 sends the SIA to an expert group that includes two representatives of the panchayat, gram sabha or municipality, and the group can recommend that the project be dropped.
4. Food security. Section 10 says irrigated multi-cropped land shall not be acquired except as a demonstrable last resort and within limits the government notifies. Where it is acquired, an equal area of culturable wasteland must be developed or its value deposited for investment in agriculture.
5. Compensation. Section 26 sets the market value. The First Schedule multiplies it by a factor of 1 to 2 in rural areas, depending on distance from an urban area as the government notifies, and by 1 in urban areas. Section 30 then adds a solatium equal to 100% of that amount, and 12% a year on the market value from the date of the SIA notification to the date of the award or of possession, whichever is earlier.
6. Rehabilitation and resettlement. The Second Schedule lists entitlements for every affected family, in addition to compensation. A family that loses a house gets a house. In irrigation projects, each person in the record of rights is to get at least one acre in the command area, and Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe landowners get land equal to what was acquired or two and a half acres, whichever is lower. Each family chooses between a job, a one-time payment of ₹5 lakh, or an annuity of at least ₹2,000 a month for twenty years. A displaced family also gets ₹3,000 a month for a year as a subsistence allowance and ₹50,000 for transport. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe families displaced from Scheduled Areas receive a further ₹50,000.
7. The urgency clause is narrow on paper. Section 40 lets the Collector take possession, before any award is made, thirty days after the notice to persons interested under section 21, but only for the minimum area needed for the defence of India or national security, for emergencies arising out of natural calamities, or for any other emergency with the approval of Parliament. The Collector must first tender 80% of the estimated compensation, and an additional 75% of the total compensation is payable. Section 9 lets the government skip the SIA when it invokes urgency.
8. Scheduled Areas. Section 41 says that, as far as possible, no land in a Scheduled Area shall be acquired, and that where it is, it shall be a demonstrable last resort. It requires the prior consent of the gram sabha, or of the panchayat or autonomous district council where no gram sabha exists, in every acquisition in a Scheduled Area, including urgent ones. It requires a development plan to settle land rights due but not settled and to restore alienated tribal land, and says tribal families should be resettled in the same Scheduled Area in a compact block.
9. What the Act does not cover. Section 105 and the Fourth Schedule exclude thirteen central laws under which land is also acquired, among them the National Highways Act, 1956, the Railways Act, 1989, the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, the Electricity Act, 2003 and the Land Acquisition (Mines) Act, 1885. Section 105(3) required the central government to extend the Act's compensation and rehabilitation provisions to acquisitions under these laws. The consent and SIA chapters do not apply to them. Ask early which law the project is using.
10. Unused land and old acquisitions. Section 101 says land unused for five years from possession shall be returned to the original owners, their heirs or the land bank. Section 24 deals with acquisitions begun under the 1894 Act. The Supreme Court's Constitution Bench in Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal (6 March 2020) held that an old acquisition lapses under section 24(2) only where possession has not been taken and compensation has not been paid for five years or more, and overruled the 2014 decision in Pune Municipal Corporation that many landowners had relied on. Both decisions are summarised in the Development Law Docket.

Forest rights under the 2006 Act

The FRA (Act 2 of 2007, assented to on 29 December 2006) recognises rights in forest land that forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers already held in practice but that the forest laws never recorded. The Rules were notified on 1 January 2008 and substantially amended on 6 September 2012 (G.S.R. 669(E)).

1. Who can claim. A forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribe can claim in the area where it is notified as a Scheduled Tribe. Any other person or community qualifies as an "other traditional forest dweller" under section 2(o) only if it primarily resided in, and depended on, the forest for at least three generations before 13 December 2005, and the Act defines a generation as twenty-five years. Both groups must have occupied the land before 13 December 2005 (section 4(3)).
2. Individual rights. Section 3(1)(a) recognises the right to hold and live in forest land for habitation or self-cultivation. Section 4(6) limits it to the area actually occupied and to no more than four hectares. Section 4(4) makes the right heritable but not alienable or transferable, and requires it to be registered jointly in the names of both spouses where the holder is married.
3. Community rights. Section 3(1) also recognises community rights such as nistar, ownership of minor forest produce traditionally collected (clause (c)), grazing and fishing rights, habitat rights for particularly vulnerable tribal groups, rights to convert forest villages into revenue villages, and the right of in situ rehabilitation for people illegally evicted (clause (m)).
4. Community forest resource rights. Section 3(1)(i) gives the community the right "to protect, regenerate or conserve or manage any community forest resource which they have been traditionally protecting and conserving for sustainable use". Section 2(a) defines a community forest resource as customary common forest land within the traditional or customary boundaries of the village, including reserved and protected forests. A CFR title matters because it gives the gram sabha a legal role in managing the forest, in addition to the right to use it.
5. The gram sabha starts the process. Section 6(1) makes the gram sabha the authority that receives, consolidates and verifies claims, maps each claimed area and passes a resolution. The Sub-Divisional Level Committee examines the resolution and the District Level Committee makes the final decision (sections 6(3) and 6(5)). Under rule 4(2) a gram sabha meeting needs a quorum of half its members, of whom at least one-third present must be women, and at least half of the claimants must be present when claims are decided. Rule 12A(10) says that no committee other than the gram sabha or its Forest Rights Committee, and no individual officer, can receive, reject, modify or decide a claim.
6. Evidence. Rule 13 lists the evidence that counts, from gazetteers, census records and old pattas to physical improvements on the land, genealogies, traditional structures such as wells and burial grounds, and written statements of elders other than the claimant. The committees must consider more than one kind of evidence and shall not insist on any particular form of documentary evidence (rule 12A(11)). Fine receipts, encroacher lists and forest offence reports cannot be the sole basis for rejecting a claim, and satellite imagery may supplement other evidence but cannot replace it.
7. No eviction during verification. Section 4(5) says no forest dweller shall be evicted or removed from forest land under their occupation until the recognition and verification procedure is complete.
8. Rejections and appeals. A person aggrieved by a gram sabha resolution can petition the Sub-Divisional Level Committee within sixty days (section 6(2)), and a person aggrieved by the sub-divisional committee can petition the District Level Committee within sixty days (section 6(4)). Rule 12A(3) requires a decision to modify or reject a claim to be communicated to the claimant in person, and lets the committees extend the sixty days by thirty more. Rule 12A(10) requires detailed reasons for any modification or rejection and says that no claim shall be rejected merely on technical or procedural grounds. Once titles are issued, rule 12A(9) requires the revenue and forest records to be updated within three months or the period under state law, whichever is earlier.

What the numbers show

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs publishes a monthly progress report compiled from state returns. The report for the period ending 30 June 2026 records 54,01,561 claims filed (51,86,693 individual and 2,14,868 community), 25,42,359 titles distributed (24,18,197 individual and 1,24,162 community) and 18,13,232 claims rejected. It counts 43,55,591 claims, or 80.64%, as disposed of, which leaves 10,45,970 undecided. Titles distributed equal 47.07% of claims filed. The national figure hides wide differences between states. In Karnataka 2,62,626 of 2,95,176 claims had been rejected and 16,700 titles distributed. In Uttarakhand 84 titles had been distributed against 6,928 claims. Chhattisgarh had distributed 52,636 community titles, more than any other state. The report lists twelve states and union territories where the Act is not being implemented, among them Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Sikkim, with the reasons each gave. Ladakh, one of the twelve, is recorded as having started the process.

The 2019 eviction order and its hold

Petitions filed in 2008 by wildlife groups, led by Wildlife First v. Union of India (W.P.(C) 109 of 2008), challenge the constitutional validity of the FRA. On 13 February 2019 a bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Navin Sinha and Indira Banerjee directed the Chief Secretaries of several states to ensure that "where the rejection orders have been passed, eviction will be carried out on or before the next date of hearing", and asked the Forest Survey of India for a satellite survey of encroachments. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs applied for modification. On 28 February 2019 a bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Navin Sinha and M.R. Shah said that the states had not explained the procedure followed in rejecting claims, that it was submitted that in most cases claimants had not been served with the rejection orders, and that it was unclear whether the monitoring committees had supervised the process. It directed the Chief Secretaries to file affidavits on the procedure, the grounds of rejection, whether claimants had a chance to produce evidence and whether reasoned orders were passed, and said: "till we examine all aforesaid aspects, we keep our order dated 13.02.2019 on hold so far as eviction is concerned." The petitions were still pending when the Supreme Court Observer last updated its page on the case in July 2025, and we found no later order lifting the hold.

For practitioners the 2019 orders have two uses. They show that a rejection is not the end of a claim, because the Court itself questioned how rejections were made. And they make the paper trail matter, because the questions the Court asked are the same questions a claimant's lawyer will ask: was the rejection order served, did it give reasons, and was the claimant heard.

PESA and the Fifth Schedule

Article 244(1) and the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution govern Scheduled Areas, which the President declares by order. The Lok Sabha Standing Committee on Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, in its report presented on 31 July 2026, records Fifth Schedule areas in ten states (Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan and Telangana), covering 77,564 villages and 22,040 panchayats.

1. The Governor's powers. Paragraph 5(1) of the Fifth Schedule lets the Governor direct by public notification that an Act of Parliament or of the state legislature shall not apply to a Scheduled Area, or shall apply subject to the exceptions and modifications the notification specifies. Paragraph 5(2) lets the Governor make regulations to prohibit or restrict the transfer of land by or among members of the Scheduled Tribes and to regulate the allotment of land to them. Paragraph 4 sets up a Tribes Advisory Council of not more than twenty members, of whom, as nearly as may be, three-fourths are the Scheduled Tribe members of the state assembly. Under paragraph 5(5) the Governor must consult the Council before making such regulations.
2. Land transfer laws are the first line of protection. Most Fifth Schedule states have regulations or Acts that void transfers of tribal land to non-tribals. In Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (11 July 1997) the Supreme Court read the Fifth Schedule with the Andhra Pradesh Scheduled Areas Land Transfer Regulation, 1959 and held that the State could not lease Scheduled Area land for mining to non-tribal private companies. The judgment is in the Development Law Docket.
3. PESA gives the gram sabha specific powers. PESA extends Part IX of the Constitution on panchayats to Scheduled Areas with the modifications in its section 4. The Standing Committee's report summarises them. The gram sabha is constituted at the habitation or hamlet level (sections 4(b) and 4(c)). It approves development plans and projects before the panchayat takes them up and identifies beneficiaries of poverty programmes (section 4(e)). The gram sabha or panchayat must be consulted before land is acquired for development projects and before people are resettled (section 4(i)). Its recommendation is mandatory before a prospecting licence or mining lease for minor minerals is granted (sections 4(k) and 4(l)). It owns minor forest produce, can prevent the alienation of land and restore unlawfully alienated tribal land, manages village markets, controls money lending to Scheduled Tribes and controls local plans, including tribal sub-plans (section 4(m)).
4. PESA works through state law. PESA binds state legislatures, and its powers reach the village through each state's panchayat Act and rules. According to the Standing Committee's report, nine of the ten states have written PESA's provisions into their panchayat Acts and Rajasthan has a separate Act of 1999. Nine have notified PESA rules, the latest being Jharkhand on 2 January 2026, and Odisha had only notified draft rules, on 10 November 2023. The report says gram sabhas in Odisha can still exercise PESA powers because the state has adapted the Act into its panchayat law.

Land records: what a family can prove

Land and land records are state subjects, so each state has its own revenue code and its own names for the documents. The functions are similar everywhere. The record of rights (called jamabandi, khatauni, 7/12 extract, pahani or patta in different states) records who holds a plot, in what capacity and what revenue is payable. Mutation is the process by which the record is changed after a sale, inheritance, partition, gift or court order. A family that has inherited land but never applied for mutation remains invisible to the revenue office, and often to the officials who list affected families when land is acquired.

1. Digitisation. The Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP), run by the Department of Land Resources, funds states to computerise the record of rights, digitise cadastral maps, computerise registration offices and link registration with the land record. It also assigns each parcel a 14-digit Unique Land Parcel Identification Number (ULPIN), called Bhu-Aadhaar. The counters on the Department's website, last updated 13 October 2026, show 40.85 crore Bhu-Aadhaar numbers, 6.31 lakh under computerised land records, 4.15 crore digitised maps and 5,611 sub-registrar offices.
2. Village house sites. SVAMITVA, launched on 24 April 2020 by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, uses drone surveys to map the inhabited area (abadi) of villages, which most revenue records never covered, and gives households a property card. As of 11 March 2026, according to the Press Information Bureau, drone surveys were complete in 3.29 lakh of the more than 3.45 lakh villages notified, 3.10 crore property cards had been prepared for 1.87 lakh villages, and more than 2.65 crore cards had been distributed.
3. Digitisation can harden old errors. A computerised record copies whatever was in the paper record, including names that were never mutated, women left off inherited land, and forest land recorded as government land. Correction then needs a formal application to the revenue officer. Help families check their own entries online before a project or a survey reaches their village.
4. Forest rights must reach the revenue record. Rule 12A(9) of the FRA Rules requires forest rights that have been vested to be entered in the revenue and forest records. Check that a title holder's land actually appears there, because a title that never reached the record may be missed when a project lists affected families.

The 2023 amendment to the forest conservation law

The Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 requires the central government's prior approval before forest land is used for a non-forest purpose. In T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India (12 December 1996) the Supreme Court held that "forest" takes its dictionary meaning and covers any land recorded as forest, whoever owns it. The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 (Act 15 of 2023, assented to on 4 August 2023) came into force on 1 December 2023, the date on which the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Rules, 2023 also came into force.

1. A new name and a new coverage clause. The 1980 Act is now the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, 1980. New section 1A(1) says the Act covers land declared or notified as forest under the Indian Forest Act, 1927 or another law, and land recorded in government records as forest on or after 25 October 1980. Land recorded as forest but changed to non-forest use by an authorised order on or before 12 December 1996 is excluded.
2. Exemptions. Section 1A(2) takes five kinds of land out of the Act. The first is forest land alongside a rail line or a public road used for access to a habitation or for roadside amenities, up to 0.10 hectare in each case. The second is trees and plantations raised on land not covered by section 1A(1). The third is forest land within 100 kilometres of an international border, the Line of Control or the Line of Actual Control, proposed for strategic linear projects of national importance concerning national security. The fourth is up to ten hectares for security-related infrastructure. The fifth is up to five hectares in a notified Left Wing Extremism affected area for defence projects, paramilitary camps or public utility projects the centre specifies.
3. Activities that are no longer non-forest purposes. Amended section 2 says that work ancillary to forest and wildlife management, including check-posts, fire lines, fencing, check dams, zoos and safaris owned by government outside protected areas, and eco-tourism facilities included in working plans or management plans, is not a non-forest purpose and needs no approval.
4. Where forest rights fit. Under rule 11(7) of the 2023 Rules, the state issues its final order for diversion only after complying with other laws, "including ensuring settlement of rights" under the FRA. Rule 10(10) lets the state grant "working permission" to begin work before final approval, after in-principle approval and payment of compensatory levies, and lists compliance with the FRA among the conditions. Communities and their advisers should ask at the in-principle stage, before any working permission, whether FRA claims in the area have been settled.
5. The Supreme Court's interim order. In Ashok Kumar Sharma v. Union of India (W.P.(C) 1164 of 2023), which challenges the amendment, the Supreme Court said on 19 February 2024 that, pending the exercise states must carry out under rule 16 of the 2023 Rules to prepare a consolidated record of forest-like areas, unclassed forests and community forest lands, and pending the proceedings, the principles laid down in Godavarman "must continue to be observed". So land that fits the dictionary meaning of forest still needs approval for non-forest use even if it is not recorded as forest. The Development Law Docket entry on Godavarman records later orders in the case.

Where an organisation can help

Checklist: when a project or an eviction notice reaches a village

Grey areas practitioners argue about

Frequently asked questions