Our Mission

Our mission is to promote decentralized and democratic forest governance, leading to forest conservation, and enhanced local livelihoods in central India. We seek to achieve this mission by facilitating the implementation of the provisions of the transformative Forest Rights Act of 2006, particularly the Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights that enable Gram Sabhas to take leadership in forest governance. Our long-term vision is of a bottom-up decision-making process about India’s forests, whether in livelihood priority forests or conservation-priority Protected Areas, or even in the context of forest diversion for non-forestry projects.

Our strategies include research, participatory action, training and capacity-building, policy outreach and people-friendly geospatial technologies.

‘CFR in Central India Initiative’ focuses, on regions with high forest cover and significant Adivasi populations in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Telangana, Odisha and Jharkhand.