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Saturday, Dec 16, 2006
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Minister springs a surprise

Special Correspondent

Minister springs a last-minute surprise

NEW DELHI: Last-moment efforts by the Left parties and the Joint Parliamentary Committee, which went into the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest rights) Bill, 2005 to change the amendments brought in by the Government have not yielded results. The Lok Sabha passed the bill on Friday.

Re-drafted bill

The Government did not accept the amendments it had agreed to in the re-drafted bill during a meeting External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee had with the JPC members in the morning, just before the official amendments were finalised.

The last-minute confusion over changing the amendments also resulted in delay in providing copies of the proposed official amendments to the members.

The members did raise the matter in the House but did not press it in view of the importance of the Bill.

Among the major amendments the Government had agreed to accommodate was inclusion of allowing hand-carts and cycles by dropping the word "transport," which is not permitted in the forest area.

Mr. Mukherjee had reportedly agreed to include waterbodies as forest produce and to hold consultations with experts on identification of national sanctuaries, though this point was kept out of the fresh bill.

Also, it was agreed that there would be adequate representation of gram sabhas on the final committee that would go into the listing of beneficiaries.

The amendments were understood to have been accepted but to everyone's surprise, the Minister chose not to accept these when the amendments were put up, a JPC member said.

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