The hills of the Northeast have always been governed by community, not by files and signatures in distant offices. For tribal communities in Meghalaya, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur and Assam, land is not just property.
It is identity, livelihood, culture and memory. Any attempt to weaken the role of village institutions in deciding what happens to that land is therefore an attack on survival itself.
A recent suggestion by the Committee on Public Undertakings has raised concern. It proposes that for a project, consent may be taken from “most” gram sabhas instead of all gram sabhas affected, as intended under the Forest Rights Act of 2006.
On paper it sounds like a procedural tweak. In practice, it changes the entire meaning of community rights.
The FRA was built on a simple principle: those who live in and depend on the forest must decide its future.
If the rule is diluted to say that 70 percent to 75 percent, consent is enough, then a developer can ignore the one village that sits inside a proposed dam site or mining area, and instead collect no-objection certificates from villages farther away who will feel little impact.
The gram sabha, meant to be a democratic protector of rights, becomes just another stakeholder to be managed.
This is not an abstract legal debate for the Northeast. Here, most tribal land is community or clan owned. Customary institutions, village councils and dorbar shnongs are the first line of governance.
In Meghalaya, for example, land largely rests with communities and private individuals, not with the state.
In Nagaland and Arunachal, village councils regulate land use according to age-old practice. To bypass the consent of even one affected village is to bypass the very system that has kept these societies intact for generations.
The risk is compounded by how “community” is defined. If the state can alter who counts as a member of a tribal village, it becomes easier to split an assembly and manufacture consent.
We have seen in other parts of India how demographic engineering is used to push projects through. The Northeast, with its sensitive ecology and distinct tribal demography, cannot afford that experiment.
Equally worrying is the silence from key ministries. When the Tribal Affairs Ministry steps back from asserting jurisdiction, it leaves a vacuum. That vacuum is quickly filled by the Centre and state governments rewriting rules for diversion of forest land for non-forest use, without the people who live there having a real say.
The FRA may not use the exact words “no-objection from every gram sabha”, but its spirit is clear. Rights cannot be recognized and then ignored when a project comes along.
For the tribals of the Northeast, this is about more than law. It is about water sources in the Khasi Hills, jhum fields in Nagaland, sacred groves in Arunachal, and community forests in Mizoram.
It is about children inheriting the same land their grandparents farmed. Once that land is diverted without full community consent, it cannot be returned.
Tribal organisations, village councils and civil society across the region must therefore treat any move to lower the consent bar as a direct threat.
The demand must be clear and non-negotiable: every gram sabha, every village council, every affected community must have a veto on projects that touch tribal land.
The Indian state must remember that development without consent is not development. In the Northeast, where community is the foundation of governance, protecting the veto of gram sabhas is the only way to protect both democracy and the forests that sustain us.
