India’s Forest and Common Lands

A major gap in understanding the situation in India with respect to land and its control is the takeover of common lands, which rarely figures in discourses on land. The Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development (SPWD, New Delhi) and RRI commissioned case studies on the takeover of common lands in India in an attempt to fill this gap. This paper is a compilation of those studies. Based on these case studies, an international conference was held in December 2012 to reflect the current situation and discuss possible policy actions.