May 11, 2023

By Deepak D. & Lakshmi Narayanan, Community Wellbeing programme

Keystone’s Community Wellbeing programme worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in developing Free, Prior and Informed Consent protocols according to their Social and Environmental Standards policy. The protocols drafted by us are in line with the UNDP Stakeholder Engagement Plan and Gender Action Plan.

FPIC is one of the rights listed out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The protocols drafted helped conduct consultations on consent for various activities planned by the UNDP under their proposed project to strengthen institutional capacities for securing biodiversity conservation commitments. They were conducted in 10 tribal gram sabhas in the Nilgiris district. This was done by coordinating with Forest Rights Committee (FRC) members, for which community health workers and volunteers from our programme along with those from the Biodiversity Conservation and People & Nature Collectives teams came together. This team diligently distributed flyers to households as well, mobilising the public for engaging in the consultations and documenting their inputs.

We also met with the Erode District Collector, Assistant Director of Panchayat, other District officials, and village level Panchayat representatives to elaborate on the goals of the project and consultations. We were grateful for the opportunity to coordinate with them and conducted the consultations in 10 gram panchayats across Erode, as the project also had implications on human rights, land rights, resources, or territories of socially marginalized groups in the Sathyamangalam landscape.

The level of community engagement observed was good, despite being influenced by social, gender factors and community composition in the village/panchayat. Such factors pushed the team to learn more about the nuances of handling social issues like caste, gender and politics. The consultations also helped improve various skills of the team and worked as a team-building exercise, improving our organisational, advocacy and field work skills. The team worked dedicatedly to successfully complete the FPIC consultations in just a fortnight, by May 11. The team and the communities were both satisfied with the overall process. The documented opinions were submitted to UNDP as reports.