Overview

• A Hindu investigation found that between January 2024 and May 2025, several thousand individual and community forest rights titles recorded in Bastar, Rajnandgaon and Bijapur districts were missing from government data.
• Congress leader Rahul Gandhi seized on the findings to accuse the BJP of erasing records as a tactic to deny land rights to Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis.
• Chhattisgarh officials attributed the drops to miscommunication and reporting errors between local and district authorities and said the figures have since been updated.
• Legal experts called the reductions anomalous under the Forest Rights Act, which does not allow routine withdrawal of granted titles without gram sabha consent.
• Forest-rights activists cited past incidents of coerced returns and backdated paperwork, and a pending Chhattisgarh High Court review will determine the legality of the record changes.