Their village, Kosma, falls within the Vidisha Lok Sabha constituency that Chouhan represents and the Budhni assembly segment that formed the core of his political career as chief minister.The episode quickly acquired political overtones. Chouhan met Yadav and pressed for answers.

The chief minister assured the former CM that he would order an inquiry. Soon after, the Sehore district administration submitted a report that backed the eviction, describing the tribal families as encroachers on forestland.Yet the Sehore episode is only the visible edge of a larger problem.

Forest department data suggest that encroachment remains one of Madhya Pradesh’s most persistent governance challenges. Of the state’s 94.69 lakh hectares of notified forestland, about 5.75 lakh hectares are under illegal occupation, roughly six per cent of the total forest area.

The burden is unevenly distributed. Burhanpur tops the list with 52,751 hectares under encroachment, followed by Raisen with 46,000 hectares.

Alirajpur has lost 25,601 hectares, Chhatarpur 12,957 hectares and Khandwa 4,034 hectares, which remain outside the forest department’s possession.The trend is equally troubling. In 2021, the forest department registered 1,825 encroachment cases involving 2,110 hectares.

By 2024, the number of cases had marginally declined to 1,774, but the land affected had more than doubled to 4,275 hectares. In 2025, authorities recorded 2,345 cases covering 4,292 hectares.

The scale of encroachment is clearly expanding a lot faster than the changing yearly numbers of cases suggest.That broader backdrop informs the state’s position in Sehore. According to the district administration’s report to the state government, only nine families were living on the disputed forestland.

The report claims the families have houses in Singhpur and Habibnagar villages, too, and are registered as voters there. It also cites Google Earth imagery showing no evidence of encroachment on the 31-hectare parcel in 2021, with occupation appearing only from 2022 onwards.The administration has also linked the encroachment to damage on a large plantation site, alleging that 78,000 saplings were destroyed from among the 3.37 lakh planted on the land.For Yadav, therefore, the controversy is not simply about one eviction.

It is about negotiating between tribal claims and political sensitivities, on one hand, and the state’s responsibility to protect forest assets, on the other. His government’s refusal to act against officials involved in the operation signals a clear choice: to defend departmental action and frame the Sehore episode as part of a wider campaign against forest encroachment.The politics of that choice, however, may prove harder to manage than the encroachments themselves.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends