How did India’s landmark Forest Rights Act come into being? And what difference has it made to the lives of historically marginalized forest-dwelling communities? These questions are at the heart of Anand Vaidya’s new monograph Future of the forest: Struggles over land and law in India that we discuss in this episode. Future of the forest offers a compelling account of the making, implementation, and partial unravelling of the Forest Rights Act, and traces the complex ways in which collective action and mobilization have shaped the use and impact of this potentially revolutionary legislation.

Anand P. Vaidya is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy.