Paper short abstract:

Collective land titling under India’s Forest Rights Act, 2006, promised autonomy for the residents of central India’s Maikal Hills. It helped crystallize an incipient conservationist ethic but has failed to deliver on its promise because of its inability to challenge deep-seated power asymmetries.

Paper long abstract:

Collective land titling with the twin aim of strengthening indigenous autonomy and bolstering conservation lies at the heart of India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. The law exudes a spirit of reparative justice towards indigenous communities (called Adivasis), and assumes an inherent indigenous capacity for environmental stewardship that is expected to thrive once titling formalizes collective rights to forest management and conservation. In this paper, we discuss the experience of the Baiga Adivasis of central India’s Maikal Hills, who successfully mobilized for collective land titling but found their hopes of autonomy belied. Forest officials interpret titling differently, and insist on logging the forests for timber. Meanwhile, a section of the Baigas determinedly strives to regulate forest use for livelihoods, and has woven a religious idiom into their conservation efforts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement between 2011 and 2021, we suggest that collective land titling contributed to the crystallization of an incipient environmental consciousness that emerged in the region in the 1990s. Far from being inherent ecological guardians or strategically deploying an essentialist identity to press territorial claims, the Baigas developed a conservation ethic in response to a combination of forest degradation, the local circulation of contemporary environmentalist ideas, and the ascendancy of changing religious practices. However, their predicament suggests that while collective land titling may dovetail with wider enabling political and cultural currents, it may still not surmount deep-rooted power asymmetries that hinder both forest-based livelihoods and conservation.