Conservation and ‘sustainable use’ are fuzzy terms. Nevertheless, together they encompass the two broad goals of forest management: the former about ensuring a wider set of environmental benefits in the present, and the latter about ensuring resource availability for the future. Ironically, neither dimension was explicitly articulated in the Indian Forest Act of 1927, leaving the colonial state free to take over and manage forests for whatever objective it desired. Later, the Wildlife Act of 1972 focused on conservation objectives alone. More recently, the National Forest Policy of 1988 set ‘environmental balance’ and ‘meeting local needs’ as the priorities of forest management, but these concepts were never internalised into the forest laws. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (RFRA), is thus a landmark legislation, because for the first time a forest law explicitly recognises both the objectives of forest management, namely, conservation and sustainable use, right in its preamble itself.