Abstract

Verifying claims over forest land under The Scheduled Tribes Act
Track: Forestry
Authors: Anoop Singh

In India a new Act, called 'The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006', was framed and it envisages giving rights to the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. All those tribals, who were cultivating the forest land before 13th December 2005 were eligible for getting title over the land, limited to 10 acres. In order to eliminate false claims, satellite images prior to 13th December 2005, coupled with GPS data was used for claim verification and preparation of titles. This study was carried out in Guntur, Prakasham and Nellore districts of Andhra Pradesh. Satellite imagery of Cartosat-2, ArcGIS 9.0, Erdas Imagine 8.6 were used in this study. Out of 13,034 claims over an area of 14,467 acres, only 1160 claims comprising 1325 acres were accepted.
The use of this method helped in convincingly rejecting the false claims.