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In the villages bordering Hasdeo-Aranya in Chhattisgarh, something strange happened at the gram sabha meetings of January 2018.
Villagers gathered, discussed everything from local roads to school attendance, passed resolutions on 21 routine items, and went home per usual. Then, months later, they discovered their names on a document giving consent to coal mining on their land.
The 22nd item, approving mineral extraction for the Adani-operated Parsa coal block, had never been discussed. It was simply added later.
The Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission later confirmed the alleged fraud, finding that elected village leaders were "mentally harassed" and "pressured" to sign documents after the gram sabha had adjourned. However, by that point, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) had already granted Stage I clearance. The state did not reconvene the meetings. Mining preparations moved forward.
This isn't an isolated incident of local misgovernance.
Over the past decade, through legislative amendments, administrative notifications, and bureaucratic rule changes, the legal scaffolding that once protected India's forests and the people inside them has been hollowed out.
No single blow brought it down. It happened amendment by amendment, circular by circular, with each change presented as a technical clarification or administrative streamlining, never as what it actually is: a structural transfer of power from communities to corporations, and from democratic oversight to executive discretion.
The Act that Changed What a Forest Is
The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act 2023 is the most consequential piece of forest legislation since the original Forest Conservation Act of 1980.
The government passed it through the Lok Sabha on 26 July 2023, despite significant opposition from environmental legal experts, tribal rights organisations, and retired IFS officers. Its full consequences are still unfolding.
The original 1980 Act placed a simple but powerful restriction on the government: no forest land could be diverted for non-forest use without prior permission from the Central government.
A 1996 Supreme Court order in the Godavarman case expanded this protection further, ruling that the term "forest" would be understood in its dictionary sense, covering all areas conforming to the ecological meaning of the word, regardless of official classification or ownership. That ruling added roughly 1.99 lakh sq kms of deemed and unclassed forests to the Act's protective umbrella.
The 2023 amendment quietly rolls back that judicial achievement. The amended Act now applies only to land notified as forest under the Indian Forest Act, 1927 or recorded as forest in government records on or after 25 October 1980.
Land that was converted from forest use before 12 December 1996, the date of the Godavarman ruling, is explicitly excluded. This is the administrative equivalent of erasing the inheritance.
The damage does not stop there. The amendment redefines "non-forest use" in ways that create what legal experts have called "regulatory black holes".
Ecotourism facilities, zoos, wildlife safaris, and all "survey or exploration activities" are no longer considered non-forest use. This means no forest clearance, no community consultation, no environmental safeguards are required for these activities.
More concerning is the open-ended delegation of authority: the Central government can now notify any activity it chooses as falling outside the definition of non-forest use.
A mining company seeking to conduct preliminary geological surveys on forest land need only to lobby the government to notify such surveys accordingly. The administrative barrier dissolves.
The amendment also carves out a blanket exemption for all strategic linear projects within 100 kms of international borders, the Line of Actual Control, and the Line of Control.
This covers vast stretches of forest in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and the Northeast, where some of India's most ecologically sensitive landscapes lie. The stated justification is national security.
The practical consequence is that enormous forest areas in the most biologically rich parts of the country can be cleared without standard oversight.
The EIA Regime: Where Oversight Died Quietly
Parallel to the legislative assault, the government has progressively weakened India's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) framework, which is the regulatory process through which large infrastructure and extractive projects obtain environmental clearance.
The EIA notification of 2006 was already a compromised instrument by the time the government released a draft replacement in March 2020. But that draft represented a qualitative leap in regulatory abandonment.
The draft EIA 2020 introduced three changes that fundamentally altered the logic of environmental governance.
It institutionalised ex-post-facto or post-facto clearances
Projects that had already begun construction without obtaining environmental clearance could now apply for retroactive approval. The Supreme Court had explicitly ruled against such clearances in earlier judgments, calling them a violation of Article 21.
It eliminated public hearings for a large category of projects
This places them in a "B2" classification, where no community consultation is required at all.
It restricted who could report violations
Only government authorities or the project developer could bring non-compliance to notice. Affected communities lost the legal standing to initiate regulatory scrutiny.
The draft has not been formally notified as final law, but this has not prevented its erosion of oversight.
As documented by the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, over 100 changes to the 2006 notification have been introduced through office memorandums since 2020, bypassing both parliamentary scrutiny and public consultation.
Many of these changes mirror the most contentious provisions of the 2020 draft. The strategy is transparent: what cannot be done through legislation can be done through administrative circulars, and what cannot survive judicial scrutiny as a single Bill can be achieved incrementally through a hundred small notifications.
The Consequences Show Up in the Data
According to Lok Sabha records, between 2014-15 and 2023-24 the government diverted 1,73,396 hectares of forest land for non-forestry purposes.
The proposals approved within the boundaries of National Parks and Sanctuaries spiked to 421 in 2023-24, up from 150 in 2022-23 and just 71 in 2019-20.
The government claims compensatory afforestation has offset much of this. However, Global Forest Watch, which uses satellite data rather than official surveys, reports that India lost approximately 23,300 square kms of tree cover between 2001 and 2023, with 95 percent of that deforestation occurring in natural forests between 2013 and 2023.
Planting saplings on degraded land is not forest restoration. It is arithmetic designed to obscure ecological loss.
When the Gram Sabha Is the Problem
The deepest wound in this governance rollback is to the institution of the gram sabha, the constitutionally protected foundation of democracy in Scheduled Areas.
The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act [PESA] of 1996 placed the gram sabha at the centre of all decisions affecting land, forests, minor minerals, and community resources in tribal areas. Nothing was supposed to happen without its consent.
The political promise of PESA was that governance would flow upward from the village, not downward from distant offices.
Nearly three decades later, the promise has barely been kept. The Jharkhand High Court banned the auction and allotment of minor mineral mines in September 2025 because the state was proceeding with mine auctions while simultaneously ignoring a court order from 2024 to notify PESA rules.
The state had not framed these rules even after the court's directive, and had issued fresh auction advertisements while a contempt petition against it was pending.
As NewsClick has documented, about 40 percent of states with Scheduled Areas have not even formulated the necessary rules to make PESA operational.
CR Bijoy, a leading expert on natural resource governance, has described the current framework plainly:
"Not a single state has currently amended the Panchayat Raj Act as required by PESA."
The Forest Rights Act (FRA) is in a similar state of administrative neglect. According to government data presented in Parliament, 19 lakh forest rights claims have been rejected and 7.6 lakh remain pending.
A 2024 fact-finding report found that in Odisha's Kandhamal district, what the administration counted as approved claims were, in many cases, granted for only a fraction of the eligible land. District and forest officials continued to wield more power over gram sabhas than the law permits.
In June 2025, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav publicly suggested that FRA land titles were responsible for forest degradation, a claim that the Ministry of Tribal Affairs formally pushed back on, asking for scientific evidence.
The claim reflects a governance culture in which forest-dwelling communities are positioned as the threat to forests rather than their most durable protectors.
The Pattern Behind the Amendments
It would be convenient to read each of these changes as a separate policy choice, driven by particular pressures or administrative needs—the FCA 2023 was a response to defence infrastructure delays, the EIA changes as efficiency-seeking, and the FRA rejections as administrative capacity constraints. But the cumulative direction is too consistent to be accidental.
What has been built, amendment by amendment, is a system in which the central executive has maximum discretion, communities have minimum legal standing, and the burden of environmental accountability falls entirely on those who can least bear it.
The 2023 FCA Amendment centralises implementation powers to the point where, as legal scholars have noted, the government transforms from a regulatory authority into a quasi-legislative body rewriting the scope of forest protection through administrative notifications.
The EIA changes shift the definition of violations from legal prohibition to administrative oversight.
The FRA and PESA failures convert legally mandated consent into an obstacle to be managed rather than a right to be respected.
This is the political ecology of forest governance in contemporary India: a structure in which ecological destruction is insulated from democratic challenge; in which the language of climate commitment (Net Zero by 2070, carbon sinks, NDC targets) provides the preamble to laws that clear the way for mining and infrastructure; and in which the people who have actually maintained these forests for generations carry the full cost of a development model they had no hand in designing.
Back in Hasdeo, the protest site at Hariharpur was allegedly set on fire in March 2024 by unidentified individuals late at night. More than 100 villagers were detained in August 2024 when tree-felling resumed for the second phase of the PEKB mining project.
The Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission's findings on forged consent have received no official response from the state government or the ministry.
Meanwhile, the forest continues to shrink.
The constitutional challenge to the Forest Conservation Amendment Act, Ashok Kumar Sharma v Union of India, is pending before the Supreme Court. The court has so far declined to stay the amendment.
The forest expert committees, ordered to map and digitise India's forest lands by April 2024, submitted data from only 20 of 28 states on the deadline.
The India State of Forest Report, due in 2023, remained delayed for over a year, with a Down to Earth RTI filing going unanswered.
The data gaps, the court delays, the pending rules, and the unanswered commissions are not administrative failures. They are features of a system being quietly, deliberately redesigned.
(Ankit Mishra is an ICSSR Fellow at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj, specialising in political ecology, environmental governance & politics, climate change, public policy and governance. He regularly writes on environment, forest, climate, policy and governance issues. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)