India’s tribal affairs ministry says the Forest Rights Act does not require gram sabha consent for forest clearance

On 31 August 2026 the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs issued a memorandum stating that there is no provision for obtaining the consent of the gram sabha for Stage-II forest clearance in the Forest Rights Act, 2006, and that "such matters do not fall under the purview" of the ministry. Down To Earth, which reported the memorandum on 10 September and quotes that language, says it answers concerns raised by NHPC about project delays attributed to the consent requirement. [UNVERIFIED] The memorandum has not been published, no file or office memorandum number has appeared in any account consulted, and this piece has not seen the document.

The context is a parliamentary report. The Committee on Public Undertakings of the eighteenth Lok Sabha examined NHPC in its thirty-first report, covered by The Tribune on 7 August 2026, which recorded that forest clearance for NHPC's under-construction projects has taken about 106 months on average, close to nine years. The committee named the requirement of 100 per cent gram sabha consent under the Forest Rights Act as the single most critical bottleneck, cited the 520 MW Teesta Stage-IV project in north Sikkim as indefinitely stalled while consent from a small minority of gram panchayats remains pending, and recommended a qualified super-majority threshold in the range of 70 to 75 per cent for large hydropower projects, with safeguards. [UNVERIFIED] Counterview, reporting the memorandum on 8 September, says seven Teesta-IV gram sabhas consented and three refused; that split is not confirmed against NHPC or Sikkim state records, and The Tribune says only that a small minority withheld consent.

On the narrow legal question the ministry is not obviously wrong, and that is exactly what makes the memorandum consequential. The Forest Rights Act recognises and vests rights; it contains no clause requiring a gram sabha to consent to the diversion of forest land. The consent step was built elsewhere. A Ministry of Environment and Forests circular of 3 August 2009 made compliance with the Forest Rights Act a condition of forest clearance under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, and required the informed consent of the gram sabhas affected by a diversion, certified by the district collector. The Forest (Conservation) Rules were amended around that circular in 2014 and 2017. The Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Rules, 2022 then removed the consent step from the stage preceding in-principle approval, so that consent now arrives after a project already holds Stage-I clearance. [UNVERIFIED] The current status of the 2009 circular, after those rules and the 2023 amendment to the Forest (Conservation) Act, was not established for this piece. [NEEDS DATA: the operative provision that today requires gram sabha consent at Stage-II, with its date and number]

So the requirement rests on executive instruments rather than on the statute the ministry was asked about. That is the whole significance of a one-page memorandum. A right anchored in an Act is removed by Parliament, in public, with a vote. A step anchored in a circular and a set of rules is removed by the ministry that issued them, and the ministry that would be expected to defend it has just said the subject is not its own. Section 11 of the Forest Rights Act designates the Ministry of Tribal Affairs as the nodal agency for implementing the Act. The Campaign for Survival and Dignity, quoted by Down To Earth, called the position an abdication of statutory authority and demanded the memorandum's withdrawal, pointing among other things to the Supreme Court's judgment in Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forest, decided on 18 April 2013, which referred the question of rights in the Niyamgiri hills to the gram sabhas and directed that the clearance decision follow what they decided.

The committee's own arithmetic deserves the scrutiny it applied to the clearance process. In the same report, the anticipated cost of the 2,000 MW Subansiri Lower project is put at Rs 27,948.52 crore against a Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved cost of Rs 6,285.33 crore, an overrun of 344.66 per cent, and the causes recorded for it are local agitations, stoppage of work, a National Green Tribunal stay, additional works, the pandemic and adverse environmental events. Gram sabha consent does not lead that list. Different projects raise different obstacles and the two findings are not in direct conflict, but a report that identifies one bottleneck as the most critical and then attributes its flagship overrun mainly to other causes is worth reading closely before its central recommendation is written into a rule.

What the super-majority proposal would change is the character of the right rather than the speed of the process. At 70 to 75 per cent, the Sikkim gram sabhas reported to have refused would be outvoted by those that agreed. A consent requirement that can be satisfied without the consent of the villages most affected is a consultation requirement with a quorum, and the distinction is not academic for the households inside the three that said no. It is also the reason this item belongs in a publication about decentralization rather than in an infrastructure column. The gram sabha under the Forest Rights Act is one of the few places in Indian law where a few hundred households hold a genuine veto over what happens to the land around them, and the mechanism now under review would convert that veto into a vote they can lose. There is a defensible case for change on the other side: nine years is a real cost, borne by a public company and eventually by electricity consumers, and no serious account of decentralization can pretend that local vetoes are free. The argument to watch is whether the delay is being fixed or simply relocated onto the people least able to carry it.

What is still unknown. The memorandum's number, signatory and full text. Whether the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, which owns the instruments that actually impose the step, has said anything. Whether the Ministry of Power intends to pursue the super-majority recommendation through a rule amendment, and how such an amendment would sit with the Niyamgiri reasoning. How many projects and how much capacity are genuinely held at Stage-II on consent grounds rather than for other reasons. And what the dissenting Teesta-IV gram sabhas say their objection actually is, which no account consulted has reported.