THE report that residents of a few villages in the Cotigao sanctuary have not got electricity, road and other amenities since Liberation is extremely damning for the state government. The neglect becomes even more scandalous because the residents are mostly people below poverty line who are the state government’s priority.

They are not destroying the forests, that is, they are not living off forests or poaching wild animals for meat; they are honest people who are earning their livelihood as daily labourers. The depth of their poverty is such that they cannot afford to come back home at the end of their work every day; they stay near their work sites. Several of them do so also because there is no road from the nearest town where work is to their village; it takes two hours or longer to travel between home and work site.
The impoverishment and neglect that these few hundreds of forest inhabitants in Cotigao are suffering is the kind of stuff that has given rise to radical ideologies like Maoism in the tribal regions of the country. It is just a question of time and opportunity when the poverty of the forest inhabitants of Cotigao can turn to a different approach which will make the government sit up. Maybe they have not risen in revolt so far because their number is very tiny. But poverty and neglect has its own political dynamics and a revolt is quite possible as a result.
Generally, in our country, forest dwellers have been treated as encroachers since the consciousness of conservation started sinking in. There have been stereotypes of forest pastoralists who with their nomadic lifestyle since colonial rule found themselves at the margin of Indian society. The relationship between forest dwellers and their forest base has oscillated between ‘conservation of nature’ and the ‘rights of forest dwellers’. The colonial rulers imposed control and regulation of forest dwellers which were continued after independence. There is a continued history of unequal treatment and marginalisation of forest dwellers.
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act was passed in 2006 with the objective of ensuring sustainable management of forest resources. The idea was that the ministry of environment and forests will work in conscientious synergy with the ministry of tribal affairs and other ministries in order to guarantee a balance between conservation and human development of the forest dwellers. The forest has been ‘a contested space’, as one study said, “a site of power struggles, where forest dwellers are threatened with displacement in order to provide space, first for modern forestry and revenue producing land, and later for conservation of nature.”
The government needs to give forest dwellers the rights to the natural resources. Conservation of nature is a collective interest. It is not possible to conserve forests by curbing the rights of forest dwellers. The forest dwellers never destroy forests as it is their livelihood and part of their culture and heritage.
Goa’s forest ministry and the ministries concerned for human development of marginalised communities such as forest dwellers must urgently undertake the task of providing electricity, water and roads to those few hundreds of totally neglected residents of Cotigao. These people must be given the rights that are guaranteed them under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act. It is very obvious that the state government agencies–and the public representatives such as MLAs and panchayat members–have not paid attention to the problems of these people, probably because they are too poor to put pressure on them to raise their issues. Perhaps there is a leakage of funds that are meant for them just as they are meant for other BPL families.
The state government must set up an official team to visit the neglected dwellers and draw up a special plan for providing them electricity, water, roads, education, health and fulfilling other basic needs.