Future of the Forest is the story of legal transformations of forests across India through collective action. Since the nineteenth century, Indian forest dwellers have been unable to enforce their claims to forest land and its products. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new national movement led to the Forest Rights Act, a landmark law that recognizes the tenure and user-rights of millions of Indian landless forest dwellers.

Anand P. Vaidya tracks the Forest Rights Act from the movements that pushed for its passage to its drafting and many revisions to satisfy local peoples, conservationists, political parties, and movements. He also looks closely at its impact on two neighboring villages in central India’s forest belt.

The forests have seen a long history of political authority enacted to the benefit of the powerful; Future of the Forest follows the work of activists and forest dwellers who turned to the law to shift this balance of power.

Anand P. Vaidya is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

“Twenty years ago the forest rights act arrived rich with the potential to undo historic injustices that had dispossessed and displaced millions of Adivasis and other forest dwellers since the nineteenth century. In this creative and perceptive study, Anand Vaidya studies the outcomes of implementing this law. We learn that laws raise hopes and unleash turmoil. Alliances are forged, struggles unfold, as battles over property rights are joined. Vaidya provides a much needed examination of the social and political life of a law in India that sought to remedy obdurate and often violently enforced inequalities in land ownership”

– K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University