Critically evaluate the role of the Central Empowered Committee in balancing conservation and community rights in India's protected areas.

Born of the Supreme Court's continuing mandamus in the Godavarman forest case and notified as a permanent body by the Environment Ministry in 2023, the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) is the Court's fact-finding arm on forest and wildlife matters [3]. Its recent Agasthyamalai intervention shows both its conservation strength and its weak grip on forest-dwellers' statutory rights.

Strengths: an effective conservation watchdog

• Independent verification cuts through State inertia: the CEC's interim report on the 3,500 sq. km Agasthyamalai landscape recorded 4,601 encroachers over about 5,072 hectares, with barely 1.8% of land reclaimed [4].
• Accountability of the powerful: it flagged 116 unauthorised government and public-utility structures and 118 serving/retired government servants among encroachers, leading the Court to order disciplinary and legal action [4].
• Enforceable outcomes: its findings translate into court-monitored, time-bound action plans plus post-eviction ecological restoration — giving Articles 48A and 51A(g) practical teeth [4].

Weaknesses: a thin rights lens

• Its surveys are framed around "encroachment", not around whether pending or wrongly rejected claims of Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers were first settled by Gram Sabhas [1][2].
• Administrative practice layers extra-statutory tests — such as proof of pre-2005, three-generation occupancy — that the Forest Rights Act, 2006 nowhere prescribes [1].
• Section 4(5), FRA bars eviction until recognition and verification are complete; eviction drives preceding claim settlement invert this sequence [1].
• Composition: expert members are drawn largely from the environment-forest bureaucracy, with no tribal-affairs or community representation, so rehabilitation is treated as a follow-up rather than a precondition [3].

The CEC has proved indispensable for conservation but remains institutionally incomplete on rights. Requiring certified completion of FRA settlement before any eviction, inducting tribal-rights expertise, and sequencing rehabilitation first would let it serve both ecological security and Article 21 livelihood guarantees — the balance the Court itself has said conservation demands.