UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Inversion of Custodianship: How Rights-Based Forest Governance Undermines Conservation under Weak Institutions in India

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.66005/bi.e202641002

Authors

Hari Shanker Gupta

Reported year

2026

Reported language

en

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:11:32.566289+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:11:32.566289+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education · Institute of Forest Productivity

Documentary abstract — original language

The Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 was conceived as a dual-mandate statute: to remedy historical injustice through the recognition of forest rights, and to secure long-term ecological stewardship of India’s forest commons. By linking tenure security with custodial obligations under Sections 3 and 5, the Act sought to transform forest dwellers into collective custodians. Yet growing evidence indicates a widening gap between statutory intent and ecological outcomes. This paper develops the concept of custodianship inversion to explain how rights-based forest governance, when implemented without procedural integrity, can systematically undermine both conservation and justice. Using Giridih district in Jharkhand as a critical case, the study combines field-based legal and procedural audits of Individual Forest Rights (IFRs) with satellitebased canopy analysis (MODIS VCF, 2005–2021). The analysis reveals pervasive bypassing of Gram Sabha verification, absence of GPS-based demarcation, and complete non-enforcement of custodial duties under Section 5. These failures are associated with systematic forest fragmentation and localized canopy loss of 8.7–13.6 per cent within 50–150 m buffers around IFR clusters. These micro-level findings align with recent national-scale evidence from Chhattisgarh (Agarwal et al., 2026), which shows that Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA)—India’s strongest village-level rights regime—does not improve forest outcomes, while political regimes associated with greater bureaucratic capacity exhibit significantly higher canopy gains. Together, the results demonstrate that rights-based forest governance, when operationally weak, functions primarily as a justice institution rather than a conservation institution, rendering ecological stewardship institutionally untenable.

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W7220426424

DOI

10.66005/bi.e202641002

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

article

Jurisdictions studied — explicit sources

IN

Natural entities mentioned

Forest

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.66005/bi.e202641002
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W7220426424

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w1970639832 · CITES
• openalex:w3143466377 · CITES
• The Forest Rights Act: A perfect recipe for the Doom of India's public forests? · CITES

0 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

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