As India approaches 20 years of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in 2026, it is time to assess how far its promise of justice and self-governance has reached – especially for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). While the Pradhan Mantri Janjati Adivasi Nyaya Maha Abhiyan (PM-JANMAN) launched in 2023 signalled renewed commitment through infrastructure and service delivery, we need to reflect on new pathways for just futures for our forests and forest dwellers. This is especially important as global research increasingly affirms that indigenous-led conservation delivers stronger biodiversity and climate resilience.The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, is among the most important laws enacted to correct the historical injustice suffered by India’s tribal and other forest-dwelling communities. It provides for a range of rights, including individual and community claims over cultivated land, access to minor forest produce, seasonal resource access for pastoral and nomadic groups, and protection against displacement and alienation. It also recognises habitat rights for PVTGs, a provision of exceptional significance.These protections matter even more in the context of changing forest cover in tribal regions. India’s official forest assessments have shown that in tribal districts, forest cover inside recorded forest areas has declined. Even in places where cover outside such areas has increased, it is often reflective of plantations and other land-use shifts rather than the strengthening of community tenure over customary landscapes. This makes the question of rights, governance, and protection over traditional habitats especially urgent.As the Forest Rights Act approaches two decades, it is necessary to assess its progress from the perspective of the country’s most vulnerable tribal communities. India officially identifies 75 PVTGs spread across 18 States and 1 Union Territory. Under PM-JANMAN, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs notes that about 7 lakh PVTG families live in 22,000 habitations across 200 districts and continue to face deep deficits in infrastructure, health, education, and livelihoods. PVTGs are recognised precisely because of their declining or stagnant populations, extreme vulnerability, including low literacy, fragile socio-economic conditions, and long histories of exclusion.Among the rights recognised under the FRA, habitat rights are especially transformative. Section 3(1)(e) provides for “community tenures of habitat and habitation” for PVTGs and pre-agricultural communities. Official clarifications by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs make clear that these rights are not limited to a housing site. They extend to customary territories used for social, economic, spiritual, religious, and cultural purposes, and may include sacred sites, burial grounds, forest use areas, and movement spaces. The Ministry has also clarified that habitat rights may overlap with other communities’ rights and can apply over both recorded forest land and certain revenue lands that fall within the FRA’s definition of forest land.In that sense, habitat rights are not simply another administrative entitlement. They are a foundational legal recognition of a people’s relationship with territory, culture, livelihood, and self-governance. They resonate with broader international principles on indigenous peoples’ rights, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which India supported in 2007.Yet, progress has been painfully slow. Publicly reported figures based on Ministry material indicated in March 2025 that only 10 PVTGs across three States – Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh – had been granted habitat rights. Odisha has been the leading State, with recognitions including Paudi Bhuyan, Juang, Chuktia Bhunjia, Saora, Dongria Kondh, Hill Kharia, and Mankidia communities. Even so, this remains a very small proportion of the 75 PVTGs identified nationally.This slow pace reveals the structural barriers PVTG communities confront. Habitat rights, like Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act (PESA), unsettle the long expansion of state control over Adivasi territories. Once recognised, such rights strengthen the claim that land cannot be diverted without due process and cannot be treated as empty space for mining, industry, dams, or exclusionary conservation. It is therefore not surprising that resistance often comes from administrative systems, especially where forest bureaucracy continues to privilege territorial control, afforestation targets, or conservation models over community-based justice. The challenge is not merely legal; it is deeply political.At the ground level, the process is made harder by multiple bottlenecks. PVTG youth often become the most active force for advancing habitat claims, yet they must navigate fading intergenerational knowledge, bureaucratic opacity, inter-departmental disputes, and widespread confusion about what habitat rights actually mean.In many places, “habitat” is wrongly reduced to “housing,” collapsing a rich territorial concept into a narrow welfare category. Mapping customary landscapes across villages, forest compartments, and departments is technically demanding, while communities often lack access to the tools and support needed to make their claims legible to the state. The result is delay, opacity, and attrition.This is why the idea of saturation must be rethought. PM-JANMAN, with an outlay of Rs 24,104 crore, marks an important acknowledgement that the development needs of PVTG communities have long remained unmet. Its design focuses on saturation of basic services and infrastructure through 11 critical interventions and convergence across nine ministries/departments. This is important and necessary. Roads, electricity, water, hostels, anganwadis, telecom, and livelihood centres can reduce deprivation when implemented well and in a participatory way.Recognition alone will not automatically produce social and economic transformationBut what PM-JANMAN does not foreground strongly enough is the need to saturate habitat rights themselves as a foundational intervention. Infrastructure without tenure security does not resolve vulnerability. A road, a hostel, or an electricity connection cannot substitute for the legal recognition of a community’s habitat. Habitat rights are the basis for secure belonging, cultural continuity, self-governance, protection from eviction, and the decolonisation of tribal lifeworlds. Without that foundation, development risks remaining externally driven and administratively fragmented.At the same time, recognition alone will not automatically produce social and economic transformation. International experience shows that formal recognition of indigenous or native tenure must be accompanied by sustained support to institutions, livelihoods, and self-governance. The same is true in India. Habitat rights must be paired with investments in local leadership, especially youth leadership; stronger Gram Sabha institutions; ecological value chains; habitat-based collective livelihoods; and systems that recognize PVTG communities as custodians and stewards rather than obstacles to development.The real promise of habitat rights lies here: not just in protecting land, but in securing a future. For PVTGs, habitat rights are not a peripheral provision under the FRA. They are a transformative democratic commitment – one that links justice, territory, culture, livelihood, and self-rule. If India is serious about advancing its most vulnerable tribal communities, saturating habitat rights must become a national mission in its own right.The latest assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – particularly the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), marks a significant shift in how climate mitigation and adaptation are understood. Moving beyond purely technological or state-led solutions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now places strong emphasis on the role of indigenous peoples and local communities as central actors in climate action, especially in land-based mitigation and ecosystem governance.Community-led, rights-based, and knowledge-driven approaches are among the most effective pathways for climate mitigation and resilience. Recognising and strengthening indigenous and local governance over forest, land and water is no longer peripheral to climate justice policy – it is central to it.Sandeep Chachra is a Social Anthropologist and Executive Director, Actionaid Association.