Ken-Betwa Row: How the Centre Passed the Buck on Tribal Displacement

THE NODAL MINISTRY THAT FORWARDS BUT DOESN'T FOLLOW UP

The Forest Rights Act, 2006 makes one thing structurally clear: the Ministry of Tribal Affairs is the nodal ministry for the law, while states carry out its implementation on the ground. That single word - "nodal"

• is doing enormous work in the Ken-Betwa story and it is worth being precise about what it actually obligates the Centre to do, because the Centre's own answer in the Lok Sabha reveals how thin that obligation currently is in practice. Being the nodal ministry does not, by the text of the FRA, mean approving every eviction, running every Gram Sabha or disbursing every rupee of compensation - those genuinely are state functions. But it does mean the Ministry is meant to ensure compliance, not merely receive complaints. When MoS Durgadas Uikey told Parliament that grievances from Chhatarpur were "forwarded" to the Madhya Pradesh government and district authorities, he described a mechanism of receipt, not a mechanism of enforcement. Nothing in that answer commits the Ministry to verifying whether the state acted, within what timeframe or with what outcome.

WHERE THE ACCOUNTABILITY ACTUALLY DISAPPEARS

This is the precise mechanism by which responsibility gets diffused rather than assigned. The Centre can accurately say it "exhorted" states to comply with the FRA's own bar on eviction before rights recognition is complete - a genuine legal safeguard - while having no instrument to make that exhortation binding.

The state, meanwhile, is the actual implementing authority but faces no separate central penalty for delay or irregularity, because oversight was never institutionalised as anything beyond correspondence. Both governments can therefore point to the other and be, in a narrow sense, telling the truth.

That is not a loophole anyone deliberately engineered for this project - it is what happens when a "nodal" role is defined loosely enough to satisfy the letter of coordination without ever specifying a mechanism of consequence.

The Supreme Court's own reading of the FRA, in the 2013 Niyamgiri judgment, leaned the other way - it held that Gram Sabha consent is not a formality but a precondition, giving forest communities real veto power before land is diverted.

Chhatarpur's complaints - about incomplete Gram Sabha processes and beneficiaries left out of compensation - are effectively allegations that this precondition was not genuinely honoured, with no institution positioned to check that claim independently of the same state government being accused.

For UPSC purposes, this is the sharper lesson than "Centre-State tension exists." It is that federal accountability gaps are rarely created by an absence of law - the FRA's protections are reasonably clear on paper. They are created when a coordinating role is written without a corresponding enforcement duty, so that following the correct procedure of "forwarding a complaint" becomes indistinguishable, in effect, from doing nothing about it.