Tribal land rights in India

The issue of tribal land alienation has to be seen as an issue of alienation of forests and agricultural lands accentuated by alien concepts of boundaries, ownership deeds and reliance on the written word. The tribal development policies failed to incorporate tribal values and the tribal people were expected to enter the mainstream on terms dictated by a highly non-tribal mind-set.
The primary resource base of t tribal people has been the land, but not so much the agricultural land as the forest land. The tribal society, its norms and its identity came from those forests. The people were forced to give up their traditional rights over the forests and remain content with agricultural lands. The practice of agriculture may not have been alien to them (as they had already been forced to work as agricultural labour), but the concept of land ownership was absent.
Unimaginative forest policies are responsible for not only making inroads into traditional forest rights but also into the very basis of the tribals' subsistence. Thus the symbiotic relationship between the tribal and the forests is getting disturbed. The traditional relationship of the tribals with the forests does not state about a new right. The Dhebar Commission also stated in its report that the forest rights had been reduced to mere concessions and afterwards these concessions also almost ceased to exist.
In the areas where shifting cultivation is an important agricultural activity, the tribals should be given ownership rights of the lands cultivated by them traditionally. The documents of ownership of such lands should be handed over to them. The cultural context of shifting cultivation should be borne in mind while attempting a transition from shifting cultivation to settled cultivation.