Abstract
This article traces the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006 inside a wildlife sanctuary in Gujarat, Western India. In so doing, it moves beyond tropes of bureaucratic inefficiency, administrative lethargy and corruption typically assigned to its ineffectiveness to examine the work of documentation it takes to mobilise the rights guaranteed within the legislation. It concentrates on the struggle for evidence-making that constitutes the ordinary life of the law as it enters lower tiers of the government and penetrates the forest dwellers’ encounters with the government. Engaging with government officers, activists and forest dwellers, it examines mapping and counter-mapping activities. Records presented as evidence draw attention to the social histories of use and contest, archived and congealed in these tactics of claim-making. In effect, the Act, in its operations extends the preexisting clashes between the state government and Adivasi claimants—which it was meant to mitigate.