Forest land encroachment in J&K is a failure – slow, deliberate, politically coddled and now dangerously entrenched. The numbers alone are staggering. Nearly 70,000 cases of illegal occupation covering approximately 20,000 hectares of forest land remain unresolved across the Union Territory. A High Court order of 2020 directing the removal of encroachments in a time-bound manner has produced barely a fraction of the required results. Five and a half years on, the forests remain occupied, the boundary pillars remain absent in thousands of locations, and the officials responsible for enforcement remain, by all accounts, unable or unwilling to act.
What has unfolded in J&K is not mere inefficiency – it is a structural collapse of governance across two departments, accelerated by decades of political convenience and, in the darker chapters of the region’s recent history, by the cover of terrorism itself. In the 1960s, forest boundaries were formally demarcated. Roughly three lakh boundary pillars were installed across J&K’s forests at that time. Decades later, a significant proportion of these pillars have vanished – some lost to natural decay, others allegedly removed by those with a direct interest in blurring boundaries. Without those physical markers, encroachment has now become a disputed issue. Competing claims now multiply faster than they can be adjudicated.
Into this administrative vacuum stepped two compounding forces. The first was the insurgency that gripped the region for much of the 1990s and beyond. In remote forest areas rendered inaccessible by the security situation, encroachment went entirely unchallenged. The second force-arguably more corrosive because it operates in peacetime- is political interference. Despite holding over 70,000 encroachment cases, the Forest Department routinely stalls action on the ground due to pressure from above. In a territory where land is scarce, politically valuable and deeply contested, forest land has become a prize that powerful interests have no intention of surrendering.
The consequences of this paralysis extend far beyond the ecological. J&K’s cities are choking on their own contradictions. Urban expansion is stalled in virtually every district because of unresolved overlapping claims between forest and revenue land. Infrastructure projects of national importance – roads, rail, housing, utilities – are held hostage by legal disputes rooted in records that have not been reconciled since independence. Compensation cases remain unsettled. Courts are overburdened with thousands of land-related disputes. The chaos that was originally seeded by neglect has now metastasised into a governance crisis that touches every aspect of public life.
The failure of reconciliation between the Forest Department and the Revenue Department warrants particular scrutiny. Land that the Forest Department identifies as under its jurisdiction is often classified differently in revenue records. Without a single authoritative, digitised land register, every eviction drive becomes a legal minefield. Encroachers exploit the ambiguity with considerable sophistication, and courts – for entirely defensible reasons – grant stays pending clarification. This is not a problem that seasonal eviction drives or fresh High Court notices will resolve. Demarcation without enforcement is cartography. It changes maps, not ground realities.
These forests are the first line of defence against the floods, landslides and soil erosion that increasingly ravage the region. Every hectare lost to encroachment is a subtraction from the region’s capacity to withstand the extreme weather events that are growing more frequent and more violent. The flooding that has visited so much destruction across J&K in recent years occurred in a landscape stripped of its natural buffers, including forests that exist now only in official registers.
What is required now is a convergence of political will and judicial authority that has so far proved elusive. The High Court must move beyond issuing directions and assume a monitoring role that holds specific officials accountable for specific parcels of land on specific timelines. The Government must demonstrate, through action rather than compliance reports, that political cover for encroachers has ended. Revenue and forest records must be digitised, cross-verified and reconciled urgently. Each month of delay is another month in which additional land is quietly absorbed, additional structures are quietly raised, and the prospect of recovery grows dimmer. The time for reclamation is now.
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