Community forest management is a phase of transition between absolute state control and a renewal of community control over the forestland that has become possible with the enactment of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. Joint Forest Management (JFM), which used to have a robust presence in West Bengal, has been facing increasing challenges from the forest-dwellers who wish to implement the FRA (2006) in the state, despite the multiple hurdles placed by the forest bureaucracy and the state government. The article studies the status of the JFM programme in the Ajodhya Pahar Hill range of West Bengal, in the backdrop of the years-long resistance of the Adivasi forest-dwellers to the proposed Turga Pumped Storage Project (TPSP). Based on an ethnographic study conducted in Ajodhya Pahar in multiple phases between 2019 and 2024, the article claims that the deteriorating relationship between the forest-dwelling communities and the Forest Department had already weakened the JFM structure in Ajodhya Pahar, to which the nascent popularisation of the FRA (2006) added further complexities. The article further argues, despite rejecting the Forest Department, that the idea of boundaries and encroachment within the JFM structure has persisted in the activities of the Forest Rights Committees (FRCs), and has eventually become incorporated in the growing Adivasi assertion for implementing the FRA (2006) in the region.