Photo: A Van Raji man standing in front of his dilapidated house. Dipika Adhikari.

With only 1,075 people remaining, the Van Raji—whose name means 'kings of forests'—are now landless in the very territories their ancestors ruled for generations. Van Rajis, identified as one of the particularly vulnerable tribal groups dwells in India’s Kumaon Himalayas as landless agricultural labourers. 

While the forest settlements in colonial and post-colonial forest administration stripped Van Rajis of their ancestral territories, in 2006, the Forest Rights Act (FRA) offered new hope. This ground-breaking law, officially referred as the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, was designed to restore and recognise ancestral lands to forest-dwelling communities while giving them decision-making powers through local governance bodies. Moreover, the Act establishes Adivasis’ right to participate in collective decision-making forums at multiple levels: Forest Rights Committees (FRC) at the village level, Sub-Divisional Level Committees (SDLC) locally, and District Level Committees (DLC) regionally. 

However, the FRA’s promised transformative tenure reform has not translated into reality for the Van Rajis.

Substandard FRA implementation 

Despite this transformative law, the Van Raji community struggle for their land security, like many other Adivasi groups in the country. 

Since 2011, when officials began implementing the law, the Van Raji have fought tirelessly to restore their land rights. However, its implementation has been nothing short of disastrous for the Van Rajis. The numbers reveal the scale of failure: of over 200 potential claimants from 60+ households, only 83 received any recognition—and even these titles are considered invalid by the government itself.

The community calls these documents ‘nakli’ (fake) because they cannot be used to access government benefits—essentially making them worthless pieces of paper rather than legitimate land titles. 

Moreover, most of the Van Raji families who received land titles discovered that officials had drastically underestimated their land measurements.

FRA implementation perpetuate social injustice and inequity 

This substandard FRA implementation in Van Rajis case reveals that land rights without self-determination are meaningless—true land security requires communities to control the very processes that determine their futures.

From the very outset, the community was ill-informed with no proper training and awareness regarding their role and functions in the collective decision-making bodies like the FRC, SDLC, and DLC. 

While a local civil society organisation organised some training programs alongside state actors, community members remain confused and uninformed. As one Van Raji woman elder explains: "We don't understand the FRA process, and we don't know our role in the Forest Rights Committee or gram sabha. Officials only told us they would make land documents."

This lack of awareness, combined with the government's superficial approach to land rights, created FRC that exists only on paper. State officials and a local civil society organisation took complete control of the entire implementation process. They created land applications, drew up land maps, and established records without any meaningful community involvement and participation.

Officials conducted land surveys without advance notice, mapped territories without community input, and made decisions in district offices far from Van Raji villages. Moreover, the forest administration hegemonised the entire land mapping process where they directed the SDLC to allocate ten hectares of land in total to the entire community. This top-down decision making, resultantly excluded more than half the households while gave the rest inadequate land titles.

Officials disregarded the community's right to self-determination throughout every stage of the FRA process: from initial awareness and training, through claim applications, to the final verification and approval of claims. Just as they ignored community participation in collective forums during awareness campaigns and land applications, officials also sidelined the community during verification and approval processes. The forest administration made all decisions about land applications single-handedly. They alone decided whose land receives recognition, how much land each person gets, and what kinds of rights the state will acknowledge. 

While the Forest Rights Act represents transformative, pro-Adivasi land reform, its implementation perpetuates social injustices and inequities. The process creates unfair distribution of land tenure, makes procedural adjustments that favour officials over communities, undermines participation and collective decision-making, and ignores customary land tenure systems and cultures. Throughout the entire land rights implementation, the principle and importance of self-determination remains sidelined.

The Van Raji struggle illuminates a path forward: meaningful land reform requires not just legal frameworks, but genuine community participation and decision-making over implementation. Their fight continues, demanding that India's land policies match their progressive rhetoric with transformative practice. 

To tackle this issue, policymakers and policy implementers must engage with Indigenous communities to reform their processes, giving particular attention to empowerment of marginalised Indigenous groups. The first step in this direction involves capacity building and awareness for all policy actors across scale. This includes Adivasi communities, local leaders, gram sabha members, forest administration officials, revenue officials, tribal welfare officers, and civil society actors. Training programs must illuminate both the provisions of the land reforms and the fundamental importance of community empowerment and self-determination for a just and collaborative recognition of land rights.

For remote, scattered tribal communities like the Van Rajis, implementing effective tenure reforms requires special funds and dedicated functionaries to redistribute responsibilities and benefits associated with land rights recognition.

Beyond boundaries: India’s land crisis

The Van Raji struggle embodies the systemic land rights failures that activists, researchers, and practitioners identified during the recent India Land and Development Conference (ILDC) First Regional Workshop on land rights and inclusive governance, held May 30-31, 2025 in Bengaluru.

Workshop discussions revealed three interconnected patterns of failure across India's diverse land rights contexts. First, progressive legislation consistently fails at the implementation stage due to bureaucratic resistance and lack of institutional capacity. Second, communities remain systematically excluded from governance processes that determine their territorial futures. Third, land rights frameworks that ignore community self-determination ultimately reproduce the very exclusions they claim to address.

The Van Raji case provides concrete evidence for each of these patterns. Their experience with the Forest Rights Act demonstrates how implementation gaps—from inadequate community awareness to top-down land mapping—can render even transformative legislation ineffective. More critically, their story illustrates the cascading effects when communities are denied meaningful participation: exclusion from Forest Rights Committee formation leads to exclusion from land mapping, which results in exclusion from verification processes, ultimately collapsing the entire legal framework.

This analysis reinforces the workshop's central conclusion that inclusive land governance is not merely a procedural improvement but a fundamental prerequisite for effective land reform. The Van Raji experience, alongside similar struggles shared by workshop participants, demonstrates that without genuine community control over implementation processes, India's progressive land laws will continue to perpetuate the injustices they were designed to remedy.

Author bio: Dipika Adhikari is a PhD researcher at the Australian National University and Deputy Coordinator at IUFRO’s Rural Governance and Forest Tenure in Tropics research group.