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The All India Union of Forest Working People (AIUFWP) has urged the Assam authorities to halt the planned eviction of villagers settled successful Nagaon district’s Lutumari Longjap reserve wood nether a British-era strategy called taungya.
The British rulers introduced the taungya strategy successful the erstwhile Burma successful the mid-1800s to trim the outgo of timber extraction and reforestation. Derived from Burmese words taung (hill) and ya (cultivation), the word describes the radical and the agroforestry method they signifier by increasing nutrient crops alongside saplings of commercialized trees, chiefly teak.
In a missive to Assam’s Chief Secretary connected June 17, the AIUFWP said the residents of 4 tuangya villages successful the Nagaon Forest Division’s Lutumari Longjap reserve wood — Kandarpa Longjap, Padumoni, Hatijur, and No. 9 Kheroni — cannot beryllium treated arsenic mean encroachers connected forestland. It pointed retired that evicting them would spell against the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006, oregon FRA, and disregard the humanities circumstances nether which the villages were established.
Copies of the letter, signed by AIUFWP president Sokalo Gond, wide caput Roma, and enforcement committee subordinate Raja Rabbi Hussain, were sent to the Prime Minister’s Office, the Tribal Affairs Ministry, and different applicable Ministries and departments.
The AIUFWP contended that the taungya strategy of wood absorption was created and administered by the Forest Department itself to settee families of the taungya practitioners wrong wood areas successful instrumentality for their labour successful forestry operations. “The concern of the 4 taungya villages of Nagaon Forest Division intelligibly indicates that the Forest Department settled them, but aboriginal termed them encroachers. This is simply a gross usurpation of Article 21A of the Constitution of India that grants the close to beingness to its citizens and of the cardinal rights arsenic granted to the citizens of this country,” the AIUFWP said.
The organisation besides said the residents person each applicable papers, including the taungya allotment documents and the yearly khiraji pattas (revenue-paying onshore colony documents), with immoderate families possessing medals awarded during British campaigns successful Burma against Japanese forces during World War II.
Appealing to the Assam authorities to nonstop the Forest Department authorities successful Nagaon to assistance alleviation to the aggrieved taungya families, the AIUFWP cited the illustration of the Uttar Pradesh government, which has granted gross presumption to 38 wood villages successful Bahraich, Gorakhpur, Lakhimpur Kheri, Maharajganj, Saharanpur, and Shravasti districts.
“In these villages, lone OTFDs (other accepted wood dwellers) reside, including those of the Muslim community,” the organisation said.
