India’s growing economy and developmental initiatives pose a significant threat to commons, forests, and pasture lands. Despite Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) being key stewards of conservation and sustainable development, they continue to face systemic exclusion from land ownership and decision-making in commons. The implementation of the 2006 Forest Rights Act (hereafter FRA) has shifted the discourse of forest governance towards community stewardship. FRA gave power to IPLCs who primarily rely on the forest for their sustenance, livelihood, overall well-being.
In this panel proposal, we aim to delve into the interconnectedness of Indigenous land tenure with livelihoods and effective community stewardship for conservation and sustainable development. In addition, the panel intends to unpack the challenges and complexities of forest dwellers, Indigenous peoples, and pastoralists face in accessing customary and collective tenure rights. In this panel, we hope to bring academic, practitioners, scholars and civil society actors to understand the recognition and implementation of Community Forest Rights (CFRs) under the FRA in India.
About the session speakers
Ms Suchisree Chatterjee
PhD Scholar, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Panelist
Suchisree Chatterjee has recently submitted her PhD Thesis to the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. She is interested in political ecology and environmental humanities. Her doctoral research explores the question of alienation and resilience among the forest-dwelling communities, while faced with large-scale human-induced transformation of the landscape. She has done extensive field work in the Ajodhya Pahar hill range of Eastern India, studying the forest rights movement of the Indigenous forest-dwelling communities. Suchisree has previously presented her research findings at the International Sociological Association Conference (Rabat, 2025) and the International Association of Commons Conference (Amherst, 2025).
Mr Lalit Singh
Van Raji community member, Uttarakhand
Panelist
NA
Mr Dharmendra Singh Gwal
Van Raji community member, Uttarakhand
Panelist
NA
Dr Dipika Adhikari
PhD graduate, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University
Chair
Dipika is an environmental governance and public policy researcher. She was awarded her PhD recently from Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, where she studied how polycentric collective forums govern land tenure security of Indigenous Rajwar peoples (Van Raji PVTG in Uttarakhand).
She is currently associated with ARPAN (Association for Rural Planning and Action), working with Rajwar peoples to secure their tenure. Dipika also acts as Deputy Coordinator in IUFRO's Rural Governance and Forest Tenure Division, where she collaborates with international researchers to advance knowledge on tenure reforms and the water-forest-land nexus globally.
She is keen to work with passionate researchers and change-makers on cross-cutting issues of changing climate, natural resource governance, environmental management, community livelihood, Indigenous knowledge systems, and climate justice.
Mr Tejendra Pratap Gautam
Research Scholar, Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Moderator
I am a PhD scholar at the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.