BHUBANESWAR: Jamguda, a remote village in Kalahandi district is perhaps going to the first village in the state to get official permission for selling minor forest produce. Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh and tribal affairs minister V Kishore Chandra Deo are scheduled to visit the village on March 3 to hand over the official transit pass to the villagers for selling bamboo.
The Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006 mandates individual and community rights to people for whom forest is the home and source of livelihood. But Jamguda, like thousands of such villages across Odisha, are yet to use the community title that empowers them to sell minor forest produce like bamboo and kendu leaf for which a transit permit (TP) is needed. The village came into focus when Union tribal affairs minister Deo wrote a letter to chief ministerNaveen Patnaik in May last year advising the government to allow the village body to exercise its rights for sale of bamboo in tune with the FRA.
Sources in the district said official formalities ahead of Ramesh's visit have been completed and that the minister would hand over the TP to the bamboo buyer, who in this case is none other than local Congress MP Bhakta Charan Das. "My role as a bamboo buyer is only a symbolic gesture. The message needs to go across the state about the benefits of FRA for the people, who for generations depended on the forest with trading monopoly vested with the government. Jamguda is the beginning, first time in Odisha. Money earned from the sale will directly go to the people," Das said.
Political parties, here, however see Ramesh's visit, third in the last two months to the KBK region, as a pre-election exercise to woo tribal voters. Ramesh will also address a meeting of tribal people convened at Narla.
"There is no bar on villages already given community rights to issue TP for passage of minor forest produce like bamboo. The FRA rule was amended in September 2012," said a senior official in the ST and SC development department, government's nodal wing overseeing the implementation of the FRA.
Sources said there were more than 15,000 villages in the state identified for getting community rights as per the FRA provisions. While 2,300 villages have already received the titles, the applications of 6,000 villages are currently being processed, the sources said. "The Odisha forest development corporation ( OFDC) will not harvest bamboo in villages already given community rights," the sources pointed out.
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