Only one of the two has actually been solved.
Nineteen years have passed since Parliament passed the Forest Rights Act, 2006. Today, almost no one says India lacks a law to protect forest dwellers. The Act exists. The Rules exist. The machinery to process claims exists too. The real question is different. Is this machinery working the way Parliament wanted it to work?
The Act was passed to correct an old wrong. Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers had lived on forest land for generations. They depended on this land for their food and their livelihood. But they never held a paper that proved this. Their life on the land was real. Their right to it was simply never written down anywhere. The 2006 Act was meant to fix this. It turned a lived relationship with the land into a right that could be enforced in law.
Now look at the numbers. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs gave these figures to the Rajya Sabha this July. As of June 30, 2026, the country had received 54.01 lakh claims. This covers 20 states and one Union Territory. Of these claims, 25.42 lakh had led to titles. Another 10.46 lakh were still pending. And 18.13 lakh claims had been rejected. That is more than two out of every five claims that were actually decided. In simple terms, for every two families who got a title, more than one family was turned away.
The government calls this "disposal" of claims. But this word hides more than it tells us. A claim can be disposed of by approval. It can also be disposed of by rejection. And rejection often happens for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the family actually has a right under the law. For the family on the receiving end, this is not just a number in a file. It can mean losing the only land they have ever known.
Look closer, and the picture gets worse. Jammu and Kashmir's own government told its Assembly in February that it had rejected 87 percent of all claims filed under the Act. The Rajya Sabha reply confirmed this with hard numbers. Out of 46,090 claims received in the Union Territory, only 6,020 titles were granted. As many as 39,924 claims were rejected. Community rights are faring even worse than individual rights. The Ministry's own Monthly Progress Report for March 2026 recorded more than 47,900 rejections of Community Forest Rights and Community Forest Resource Rights claims across the country. West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh reported the highest numbers. This matters because Community Forest Resource rights were meant to give real power to Gram Sabhas over their own forests. This is the part of the law meant to do the most good. So far, it has done the least.
The law was never silent on fairness
It would be wrong to think the Act leaves claimants at the mercy of officials with no checks on their power. The law deliberately keeps the final word away from the Forest Department and the usual revenue officials. Instead, the Gram Sabha sits at the centre of the process. It receives claims. It examines evidence. It makes the first decision. This design exists for a simple reason. The kind of proof that matters here, memory, custom, long years of living on the land, rarely shows up in a government file.
The Rules add real teeth to this process. Rule 12A says Forest and Revenue officials must be present when a claim is verified on the ground. They must record what they observe. If a claim is changed or turned down, the claimant must be told. Only then can they file an appeal. If a claim is incomplete, the Rules say it should go back for another look, not get thrown out. Rejection cannot happen for the sake of convenience either. Higher committees must give clear, specific reasons whenever they change or reject a Gram Sabha's recommendation. The Rules say plainly that a claim cannot be rejected on technical grounds alone. Officials at the block, panchayat or forest range level have no power on their own to reject or change a claim.
The Rules also understand something simple. Forest communities were never going to have title deeds. That was the entire point of the Act. It was meant to recognise rights that had never been written down. So officials cannot demand one specific kind of paper as proof. The absence of paperwork, on its own, cannot defeat a claim. Satellite images and mapping technology can help verify a claim. They cannot replace the process the law requires.
None of this is vague. The safeguards in the law are clear and mandatory. What is unclear is whether officials on the ground actually follow them. An independent fact finding committee looked into how the Act was being carried out in several districts, including in Odisha. It found villages where claims had remained unanswered for almost ten years, it also found claimants who were never given a written order, or even any proper reason, explaining why their claims were rejected, this is not a problem with the law, it is a failure to properly follow the law which already exists.
When rejection becomes a habit, not a finding
There is an important difference between a claim being rejected because it does not satisfy the requirements of the Act, and a claim being rejected simply because it is difficult or inconvenient to process, some claims genuinely do not fulfil the requirements of the Act, rejecting such claims is fair, as long as the proper procedure given under the law is followed, but what is not fair is rejecting a claim simply because a family is not able to produce one particular document
. Or because a government record stays silent on their years on the land. Or simply because verifying the claim takes effort.
This is not a small detail. The entire idea behind the Act was that these rights existed long before anyone wrote them down. If the absence of a paper record becomes the reason to deny a right, the process ends up repeating the very injustice the Act was meant to undo.
Courts have said this plainly. In Ashadul Sekh v. State of West Bengal, the Calcutta High Court held that removing forest dwellers without following the Rule 12A process has no legal basis. Protecting the environment cannot come at the cost of skipping the law.
Rights and conservation are not enemies
Many people assume that forest rights and forest protection pull in opposite directions. They think that giving a family the right to live on forest land is somehow a loss for conservation. The law does not support this idea. Section 3 lists specific and limited categories of rights. People who hold these rights also carry duties toward wildlife, forest cover and biodiversity. The law was built to balance the two, not trade one for the other.
The Supreme Court's recent decision in Abdul Khalek v. State of Assam shows how this balance is meant to work. The Court did not say that anyone living on forest land can stay there automatically. It said something narrower, and more important. A person holding rights under the Forest Rights Act is a lawful occupant, not an encroacher. They cannot be evicted without notice, without a chance to show evidence, and without a reasoned decision. Due process is not a favour done to forest dwellers. It is how the State decides who has a right to stay and who does not.
This same idea runs through both cases. Protecting the environment is not an exception to constitutional process. It is a part of it. The State certainly has the power to protect forests. But it cannot use that power as if the Forest Rights Act simply did not exist.
What real implementation would look like
If the next phase of this law is to mean anything, the focus must shift. It should move away from counting how many claims were disposed of. It should move toward asking how those claims were decided.
A good starting point is simple. Every rejected claim should come with a clear, specific reason written down. A rejection that just says "insufficient evidence" tells a family nothing about what went wrong. District level data on rejections, along with the reasons behind them, should be public as a rule, not an exception. Right now, the J&K and community rights figures came out only because someone asked a question in Parliament. That should not be the only way such information becomes public. The appeal process the Rules already provide needs to actually work. An appeal that a poor, forest dependent family cannot reach or afford is not a real remedy. And whatever role satellite images and mapping tools play, they should support a human decision. They should not replace the judgment of the Gram Sabha or the value of oral and customary evidence.
Government reports also need better measures of success. Titles given out and claims disposed of are easy numbers to publish. But they say nothing about quality. Better measures would include how many rejections come with clear reasons, how fast appeals are resolved, and how much community forest land has actually been recognised.
What the Act was really promising
Set aside all the procedure for a moment. The Forest Rights Act was never only about land titles. It was an attempt to give real meaning to the Constitution's promise of social and economic justice. This matters most for communities whose bond with the land was built on custom, not paperwork.
Eighteen lakh rejections do not, by themselves, prove that the Act has failed. Many of those claims may genuinely not meet the legal requirements. But this number does prove one thing. These rejections deserve at least as much attention as the twenty five lakh titles the government likes to talk about.
Getting this right does not mean going soft on forest protection. It does not mean approving every claim regardless of evidence either. It simply means examining every claim the way the law requires. It means giving reasons when a claim is refused. And it means making sure claimants can genuinely challenge decisions that go against them.
The real test of the Forest Rights Act was never about how fast a state clears its backlog. The real test is simpler than that. Can a forest dwelling family, whose only proof is generations of dependence rather than a government file, go to the State and get back a decision that is lawful, reasoned and fair? That is not too much to ask for. It is exactly what constitutional governance is supposed to guarantee.
Author is an Assistant Professor of Law at ICFAI Law School, The ICFAI University Jharkhand. Views are personal.