The Ministry of Tribal Affairs has said the Forest Rights Act has ‘no provision’ for Gram Sabha consent at Stage-II forest clearance, the final approval stage for diverting forest land.
The article argues that Gram Sabha consent is central to how the FRA works, because village assemblies initiate the process of recognising forest rights and must consent in key decisions affecting those rights.
A proposal to dilute the consent rule for large hydropower projects could allow a majority of villages to approve diversion even when some affected Gram Sabhas refuse.
Weakening consent could endanger forest dwellers’ rights, make it easier to divert forests where rights remain unsettled, and undermine India’s forest carbon sink.
On August 31, the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs said in a memorandum that the Forest Rights Act, 2006, has “no provision” for the consent of Gram Sabhas at Stage-II, the final approval stage for diverting forest land.
A Gram Sabha is the assembly of all adults in a village. Under India’s 1980 forest conservation law, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change first grants in-principle Stage-I approval, with conditions, and then Stage-II approval once the developer and the state government have met them.
The tribal affairs ministry, which Section 11 of the FRA names as the nodal agency for implementing the Act, added that such matters lie outside its purview.
The Act never ties ‘consent’ directly to forest clearance, and clearance delays are real. Parliament’s Committee on Public Undertakings, examining the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, reported that forest clearance for NHPC’s projects under construction took 106 months on average.
Yet Gram Sabha consent is central to how the FRA works. If the Centre denies consent on a legal basis, or dilutes it, others will be able to sign away a village’s forests — at a cost to forest dwellers’ rights and to India’s forest carbon sink, the carbon dioxide that its forests absorb and store.
What the Act says
The FRA builds its machinery around the Gram Sabha. Section 6(1) makes it the authority that starts the process of determining forest rights.
Section 3(2) allows the Centre to divert up to one hectare of forest land for village-level facilities such as a school, but only if the Gram Sabha recommends it. A law that asks this much for a school cannot sensibly ask less for a dam.
Under Section 4(2)(e), a state government may resettle people from a critical wildlife habitat only after Gram Sabhas give their ‘free informed consent’ in writing. Such habitats are parts of national parks and sanctuaries that, on scientific evidence, must remain free of human use.
The Act uses the language of consent where it governs a decision itself. Its silence on forest clearance gives the Centre no licence to drop consent there, because the two laws divide the work.
The FRA settles who holds rights in a forest, and Section 4(5) bars the eviction of forest dwellers until the process of recognising and verifying their rights is complete. The 1980 forest conservation law sets the procedure for diverting forest land.
In 2009, the environment ministry, which administers the forest law, issued a circular requiring written Gram Sabha consent and certification that the settlement of rights was complete before forest diversion.
In 2013, in the Niyamgiri case, the Supreme Court left it to the Gram Sabhas of the affected villages to decide whether bauxite mining in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills would affect their rights. All 12 Gram Sabhas rejected the mine, and the environment ministry then refused it forest clearance.
The consent requirement came from a 2009 letter by the environment ministry, not from the Act itself. Since then, the ministry has moved the Forest Rights Act check to the end of the process.
Under the Forest (Conservation) Rules, 2022, and the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Rules, 2023, the Centre gives final approval first. After that, the state government must ensure that forest rights are settled before it can order diversion of the forest. The rules mention the settlement of rights but do not refer to Gram Sabha consent.
The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes argued that this change removed the consent requirement. The environment ministry, however, said the two laws are “parallel statutory processes”.
Proposals that already have in-principle approval retain the conditions attached to that approval. Teesta-IV, which received in-principle approval in 2013, is one such case, and its final clearance still depends on consent.
The memorandum also sits uneasily with the tribal affairs ministry’s own record. In August 2014, it told the environment ministry that the FRA “does not provide for any exemption to its provisions for any category of forests, projects, persons etc”. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has cited ministry positions from 2012, 2018 and 2023 that treated Gram Sabha consent as mandatory.
Each village holds its own rights under the FRA. Therefore, the “100 per cent” rule means the consent of every affected Gram Sabha. It does not mean unanimity within any one Gram Sabha.
The Committee on Public Undertakings wants to dilute the rule, yet even its report treats “100 per cent” consent as the law. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs went further than the committee because its memorandum finds ‘no provision’ for consent at Stage-II at all.
The committee’s case has some force, because under the present rule a few holdouts can stall a large project for years. But its remedy — a threshold of 70 to 75 per cent across villages for large hydropower projects of national importance — would allow a majority of villages to dispose of a minority’s forests.
Villages that refused would lose forests in which the law recognises their rights because other villages had agreed.
Parliament has written consent into land law before. Its 2013 land acquisition law requires the prior consent of the Gram Sabha or the panchayat, the elected local council, for land acquisition in Scheduled Areas, the tribal regions protected by the Constitution’s Fifth Schedule.
Consent on paper
The real failure is that state governments and Union Territory administrations obtain consent late and treat it as a paper formality.
In May, the Andaman and Nicobar administration told the Calcutta High Court that the Gram Sabhas that approved forest diversion for the Great Nicobar project had met their quorum.
By its own figures, 349 people attended from seven villages with 7,519 residents. The quorum counts members — a village’s adults — so a count of residents cannot, by itself, show a breach. But the figures do set a ceiling.
For every meeting to have had a quorum of half its members, the seven villages could have had no more than 698 adult members between them, fewer than one in 10 of their residents.
In Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district, the Gram Sabha of Salhi met in January 2018 over roads and water. Its minutes later recorded consent for the Parsa coal mine and said 450 people were present, when 150 had attended, the state’s Scheduled Tribes Commission found in 2024. Rajasthan’s state power utility, which holds the block, disputed the findings.
The case for hydropower
There are good reasons to speed up the process.
According to the Union Ministry of Power, new hydropower will cost Rs 7 to Rs 8 per unit unless costs are tightly controlled. States also ask for free power — a share of the output they take without paying — and for a water cess, a fee for the water used by turbines.
India also needs pumped storage, where water is pumped uphill when power is cheap and released through turbines when demand is high. By April 10, 2026, India had installed only about 7 gigawatts of an estimated 280 GW of pumped-storage potential, as noted by the Committee on Public Undertakings.
Solar and wind power, which depend on the weather, need this storage. Every year a project waits for approval, its costs rise.
Consent, however, is only one obstacle among several. The same committee report cites the scarcity of land for compensatory afforestation, the planting that a developer must pay for in place of the forest it clears.
It also cites double compensation in Arunachal Pradesh, where NHPC must pay tribal communities for the loss of their customary rights over unclassified state forest land and also pay the state government, which claims compensation for the same land.
The clearance process also seeks consent last, after years of other approvals, when a refusal appears most costly.
Sikkim’s Teesta-IV hydroelectric project received Stage-I approval in February 2013. As of July 31, the Central Electricity Authority listed its final clearance as awaiting the settlement of forest rights and consent from three of 10 Gram Panchayat units.
A Gram Panchayat unit is the area governed by one Gram Panchayat, an elected village council, in Sikkim. Each unit may span several Gram Sabhas. More than 13 years after Stage-I approval, the settlement of rights itself remained unfinished.
Before the Centre overrides the three units, it should ask why they are holding out.
Clean energy does not change what it means to take a forest from the people who hold rights in it. Since 2023, when a glacial-lake flood — the torrent that pours out when the debris damming a glacial lake gives way — wrecked the Teesta-III dam upstream, Lepcha residents near the site have voiced fears for their safety. Their concerns extend to their land and to a lake they hold sacred.
India’s 2035 climate pledge needs both dams and forests. It counts hydropower towards its non-fossil target, and forest and tree cover towards an additional sink of 3.5 billion to 4.0 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
A weaker consent rule would make it easier to divert forests where rights remain unsettled, and the carbon those forests hold would become less secure.
The United Nations biodiversity conference in Yerevan, due to open on October 19, will review targets on respecting communities’ land rights — a principle the memorandum undercuts.
Settle rights first
The tribal affairs ministry should either withdraw or clarify its memorandum.
The Committee on Public Undertakings suggests starting the clearance process at the pre-feasibility stage, the first step to determine whether a project deserves detailed study. The Centre should follow this advice and require state governments to settle rights and obtain consent at this early stage, before developers spend money.
Gram Sabha meetings should have a legal quorum of half the members, with women making up a third of those present. Each meeting should record votes, and independent facilitators should conduct the proceedings.
There should be a 90-day deadline for a clear, appealable decision, which the environment ministry should post on PARIVESH, its online clearance portal. The FRA will be 20 years old this December. If the Centre removes the consent requirement, the Act will give forest dwellers a title to land they cannot protect.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth