The recent scholarship on commons argues that every common should have clearly defined boundaries and institutional arrangements to regulate the rights of the beneficiaries. Determining boundaries for commons includes terms like ‘demarcation’ or ‘enclosures’, which have multiple meanings and applications, particularly in forestland. The history of colonial forestland in India speaks about the demarcation of hectares of forests as reserved or protected forests, primarily achieved by expelling all the forest-dependent communities without any settlement of customary rights. With the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, the Indian Government introduced the provision of recording Community Forest Resources (CFR) to address the ‘historical injustice’ faced by the Scheduled Tribes and other forest-dwelling communities since the colonial demarcation of forests and the subsequent control by the Forest Department. However, the process of demarcating the boundaries of CFR under FRA (2006) has faced multiple contestations among different stakeholders like the Forest Department, the Gram Sabhas (village councils formed under FRA 2006), the Forest Protection Committees and the people who have accessed the forests without any institutional acknowledgement. Based on ethnographic studies undertaken in phases in the Ajodhya Pahar Hill Range of Eastern India, the current paper has tried to show how the process of demarcating the forest commons has been severely contested between several institutions and groups, despite the state itself mandating the regulation and demarcation of CFR by the concerned Gram Sabhas formed under FRA (2006).
