Illegal Allocation of Podu Land Raises Concerns Over Forest Rights Act Implementation

Hyderabad: The issues caused by the state government issuing pattas for podu land continues to raise concerns with doubts being expressed if the process under the RoFR Act (Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006) was exploited to grant housing plots illegally in forest land.

The government is distributing podu pattas for more than four lakh acres of forest land in 26 districts to about 1.5 lakh beneficiaries.

In several districts, particularly in Adilabad, Asifabad, Jayashankar Bhupalapalli, Mulugu, and Khammam, thousands of applicants for podu land were for houses built on forest land, it is reliably learnt. These plots extended to between 100 square yards (sq. yds) to around 400 sq yds, areas which are not suitable for cultivation as they are too small to raise any meaningful quantity of crop even for self-sustenance.

Government sources said that the forest department had written to the tribal welfare department, nodal agency for beneficiary identification and distribution of the pattas, to provide it with a full list of beneficiaries and the land parcels for which they were granted pattas. The forest department is learnt to have sought this information as it “needed to know where and how much land it is supposed to protect is no longer in its direct control.”

While RoFR Act does allow user rights for dwellings in forest areas for those who had built them before the December 2005 cut-off date, many of the small plots of land for which pattas were given, were in fact for houses built on forest land, sources said.

According to sources, most of these podu ‘housing’ patta receivers had built their homes after December 2005, which means that the government violated the RoFR Act, and the Forest Conservation Act in giving them pattas. The FC Act provides for diversion of forest land for other purposes only if the government provides alternative land to compensate it.

The issue of podu pattas for such cases became easy for the government which decided that it will not use timeline satellite imagery to determine forest land occupancy of the claimants since December of 2005. Since all approved applications relied on verbal authentication by village ‘elders’, this became easy for the government to issue house pattas in forest land in violation of laws, the sources said.