[ Tadup Tana Tara ]

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a courtroom when a case is not really about the parties before it – when the file in hand is only the visible tip of something far older and far larger. I have sat with that silence many times. Across numerous litigations involving CAMPA, forest clearances, and disputes over tribal land in Arunachal Pradesh, a pattern kept surfacing beneath the individual facts of each case – the quiet, recurring friction between colonial forest law, modern environmental legislation, and the customary landholding traditions of our indigenous communities. Out of that friction rose a question too large for any single brief: how have our forest laws, and the working of CAMPA, come to quietly erode the customary land rights of the people of Arunachal Pradesh?

I write this as a son of this soil not as courtroom argument but as testimony – a lawyer’s duty to place on record, for the people of this state, a matter of constitutional weight and public consequence. If it does nothing else, may it sharpen the debate our legislatures must eventually have, and stand as a record for those who come after us.

Arunachal wears its forests the way few places on Earth still can – more than eighty percent of the state remains under green cover, an unbroken canopy across the Eastern Himalayan biodiversity hotspot, one of the richest ecological inheritances India holds. But look past the postcard, and beneath that abundance runs a legal fault line few outside the courts have paused to examine.

This is not simply a story of trees falling or of development squaring off against conservation. At its root, it is a constitutional question – how statutory forest law sits, or fails to sit, alongside the customary land rights of Arunachal’s indigenous peoples. Over a hundred years, colonial statutes, parliamentary enactments, judicial pronouncements, and administrative habit have layered themselves one on top of another, until the resulting structure barely resembles the historical truth of who has always held this land. Left unexamined, this framework threatens something quieter than deforestation but no less permanent: the slow dispossession of communities from the ancestral ground beneath their feet, even as it holds back the state’s own aspirations for growth.

A land governed by custom, not title deeds

Elsewhere in India, land speaks the language of registries and title deeds. In Arunachal, it has always spoken a different language – the language of custom. Every village, every clan, every tribe held its forests, its fields, its grazing grounds, its rivers, its hunting paths, not because a document said so but because generations had said so before them, and no one within the community thought to question it. Land here was never merely property. It was memory made tangible – identity, lineage, and continuity, held in common rather than fenced off in private names.

For centuries this system needed no paper, because the community itself was the record. Then came colonial administrators, carrying legal categories built for settled agrarian societies far from these hills, and pressing indigenous life into forms it was never made to fit. Vast stretches that had always belonged to tribal communities were never surveyed, never entered into any revenue register – not because no one owned them, but because ownership here was never the kind of thing colonial law knew how to write down.

That omission has cast a long shadow. Because customary title was never captured by cadastral survey or revenue settlement, ancestral land drifted, on paper, into the column marked ‘government land’.What looks on the surface like a dispute over property is, underneath, something else entirely – a contest between an ownership the community has always recognised and an ownership the administrative record merely presumes.

Geography makes the crisis even more acute

The mountains themselves conspire to deepen this dilemma. Arunachal spans nearly 83,743 square kilometres, but most of that expanse is steep ridge, dense canopy, rock face, and valley too remote to reach easily. Only a narrow corridor of this vast terrain can hold a village, a field, a school, a clinic, a road – and it is precisely this narrow, precious strip of habitable land that so often carries the government label of Unclassed State Forest (USF) or some kindred forest classification. Land a community has tilled and tended for generations finds itself, in the eyes of statute, still forest – and there, in that gap between lived use and legal label, the present crisis of land governance takes root.

The continuing legacy of colonial forest law

Trace the lineage back far enough and you arrive at the Assam Forest Regulation, 1891 – a statute born of empire, drafted to secure the Crown’s grip over timber and forest revenue, never to recognise the tenure systems of the people who already lived there.

Its defining assumption was blunt: land unsupported by permanent, heritable, transferable, and formally documented rights could be treated as land at the disposal of the government. That assumption may have suited colonial priorities. It could not have been more at odds with the customary institutions of Arunachal Pradesh, where ownership was collective, oral, and never meant to be reduced to paper in the first place.

And so, quietly, without a single acre changing hands in truth, ancestral land acquired the bureaucratic name of Unclassed State Forest – not because any tribe surrendered its claim, but because colonial procedure never asked for, and never recorded, what the community already knew to be true. That historical accident still governs land administration today.

The expansion of central forest regulation

The picture grew more complicated still with the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, which Parliament enacted for an unimpeachable purpose – to halt the reckless diversion of forest land for non-forest ends, and in doing so, to strengthen environmental protection across the country.

Its reach widened sharply after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in TN Godavarman Thirumulpad vs Union of India (1996), which read the word “forest” broadly enough to capture not only notified forests but any land merely recorded as forest in government files.

For Arunachal, that reading carried heavy consequence. Since so much of the state already sat recorded as Unclassed State Forest, all of it fell, almost by accident of paperwork, under the strict central clearance regime – regardless of who had lived on it, farmed it, or called it home for generations. What resulted was a widening overlap between environmental regulation of constitutional stature and customary rights that neither colonial law nor the administrations that followed ever fully reconciled.

The dormant promise of the Forest Rights Act

In recognition of the historical wrongs done to forest-dwelling communities across India, Parliament passed the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 – a law that promised, at last, to recognise traditional rights over forests and their resources, and to reconcile environmental governance with indigenous customary ownership.

That promise, in Arunachal, has largely gone unfulfilled. Without systematic surveys, without the formal settlement of customary claims, without the institutional coordination the Act envisioned, its implementation has barely disturbed the existing legal landscape. The uncertainty around community ownership persists, undiminished, more than a decade and a half later.

CAMPA: Conservation or permanent alienation?

Perhaps the sharpest edge of this crisis lies in projects funded under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA).

Its founding purpose is beyond reproach – when forest land is diverted for development, compensatory plantation is meant to restore what is lost, to grow forest anew elsewhere. But implementation has revealed a legal concern that no amount of good intention resolves. When community land is chosen as the site of that compensatory afforestation, administrative practice often requires the land to pass under the control of the Forest Department. What begins in the name of conservation may end, quietly, in the alteration of the very legal character of ancestral community land.

If ownership records, once modified, do not revert, then an afforestation project undertaken today may extinguish, or at least dilute, rights the community has held since long before the project began. This is not a theoretical concern.

Land that today feeds a village may tomorrow be beyond reach for a school, a hospital, a road, a drinking-water scheme, or a field – without a fresh round of forest clearances first. Villagers may one day find themselves asking permission to use ground they have always considered their own. Conservation, rightly done, should make communities stronger stewards of their land – not strangers to it.

The urban land paradox

Nor does this trouble stay confined to remote hillsides. Many district headquarters and urban centres – including parts of the Itanagar-Naharlagun capital region – stand today on land still recorded, on paper, as forest. These towns have functioned for decades as centres of administration and commerce, yet the ground beneath them remains, in law, uncertain.

That uncertainty ripples outward in very practical ways. Property becomes legally fragile. Banks grow reluctant to lend against it. Municipal planning stalls. Investment slows. Cities expand ahead of the law meant to secure them.

The paradox could hardly be starker: citizens live in permanent settlements the state itself built and sanctioned, and still the legal ground beneath their homes remains unsettled.

Administrative capacity cannot solve a structural problem

None of this can be blamed simply on inefficiency. The Forest Department is tasked with guarding more than eighty thousand square kilometres of some of the most difficult terrain in the country, with limited staff and limited funds. Its officers are asked, all at once, to protect forests, oversee conservation, process statutory clearances, monitor afforestation, and support development – across landscapes that resist even the most determined administration.

No system, however well-run, can function cleanly atop a legal foundation that is itself unsettled. What is needed is not a better administration. What is needed is better law.

Reclaiming the constitutional space available to the state

Fortunately, the Constitution already hands Arunachal the tools to address this.

Entry 18 of the State List gives the state legislative competence over land, land tenure, rights in land, and the transfer and alienation of agricultural land. Forests sit in the Concurrent List, but Article 254 (2) opens a constitutional door: a state law, reserved for and granted presidential assent, can validly stand even where it departs from an existing parliamentary law on the same concurrent subject.

That door is wide enough to walk through – wide enough for Arunachal to draft legislation fitted to its own customary landholding system, without abandoning its commitment to environmental conservation.

A roadmap for reform

Meaningful reform, I believe, should rest on four principles.

First, resolve the ambiguity of Unclassed State Forests once and for all. Let scientific survey, customary verification, and transparent statutory process identify the lands indigenous communities have long owned and managed, and let that ownership be formally recognised in a manner consistent with local custom.

Second, redesign how CAMPA operates, so that compensatory afforestation stops quietly transferring ownership of community land. Statutory leases or usufructuary rights can serve conservation just as well, while leaving underlying customary ownership untouched.

Third, rationalise the old forest boundaries that still, on paper, blanket long-established towns. Urban residents deserve secure legal title, access to institutional finance, and planned development free of this inherited ambiguity.

Fourth, put firm timelines on statutory approvals for essential public infrastructure. A school, a hospital, a rural road, a drinking-water project should never sit indefinitely behind administrative delay. Time-bound decisions can serve governance without loosening a single environmental safeguard.

Conservation and customary rights need not be opposed

This should never be framed as tribal rights against environmental protection – the two were never truly opposed. Indigenous communities were conserving Arunachal’s forests long before the word ‘conservation’ entered any statute book. Their customary institutions carry, in practice, the very principles of sustainable stewardship that modern environmental policy is still learning to articulate.

The task, then, is not to replace customary governance with statutory control, but to weave both into one coherent constitutional fabric – recognising, finally, that environmental protection and indigenous ownership were always meant to reinforce each other, not compete.

Conclusion

Arunachal stands today at a genuine constitutional crossroads. Few states in India can claim its ecological wealth, its living customary institutions, or a constitutional identity so distinctly its own. And yet the law governing its forests and land still carries the weight of assumptions inherited from an empire that neither understood indigenous landholding nor imagined the constitutional values India would one day hold dear.

The task before our policymakers is not to tear down environmental protection, but to rebuild it around the historical truth of customary ownership – to harmonise conservation, development, constitutional federalism, and tribal autonomy, rather than treating them as rivals for the same ground.

Undertaken with vision, and with the sensitivity this history demands, such reform would do more than settle old legal ambiguities. It would honour a constitutional promise still owed – that the people of Arunachal may protect their forests without surrendering their claim to the land that has sustained them for generations.

The future of Arunachal rests not only on how well its forests are conserved, but on whether those who have kept them – for longer than any statute has existed – remain their rightful custodians still. (The writer is a senior advocate and former journalist. The views expressed are personal.)