Conflict simmers between Adivasi communities and the state, as authorities have earmarked more than 4,000 acres of farms and common property lands—an area larger than 3,000 football fields—for a tree plantation project in 16 villages of Korea district in the mineral-rich state of Chhattisgarh. The project will undertake ‘compensatory afforestation’ for the forests that will be cleared for the Parsa coal block in neighbouring Sarguja district, for which the environment ministry gave permission in February 2019.

In the adjoining village of Chhote Salhi, villagers narrated similar accounts. Pannalal Sai recalled the labourers arriving on his land: “’Paudha lagega’ bolay. Kya paudha? Kyon lagega? Rajasthan side ke labour lag rahay thay. Humko aur kuch nahi bataaye. (Trees would be planted, they said. [We asked] what trees, and why? They seemed like workers from Rajasthan. They didn’t tell us anything).”

Salaam, Sai and other villagers eventually gathered that the labourers were marking out their lands on the orders of the district forest department, who planned to fence these in for plantations.

A fierce late-April sun beat down as Sai, a diminutive, soft-spoken man clad in a white shirt and blue-checked lungi, led us out of the family’s cool mud-and-tile home to their land, a rectangular plot of mixed cropping surrounded by a few mahua trees, on which the family grows corn, paddy, sesame, pulses and vegetables through the year. “Land is the basis of our survival,” Sai said, “If the government takes it away for plantations, how will we survive?”

 
Pannalal Sai and Babulal Salaam are among the scores of villagers who found their lands being forcibly earmarked for compensatory tree plantation in lieu of forests to be stripped for the Parsa coal block. More than 4,000 acres in 16 villages have been earmarked for this plantation project.

 In India, projects that necessitate the use of forest areas for non-forest purposes, such as mining and infrastructure projects, are required by law to undertake ‘compensatory afforestation’ (CA) on an equivalent piece of non-forest land, or double the expanse of ‘degraded forest’ land. In the past, forest departments have largely created monoculture plantations of non-indigenous, commercial species such as eucalyptus, acacia and teak under compensatory afforestation projects. The government counts such plantations as forests. The plantation scheme is a component by which the government maintains that it is increasing forests, thus fulfilling a key commitment under the 2015 Paris Climate agreement to counter climate change by creating carbon sinks.

The compensatory afforestation project pitched in Thaggaon, Chhote Salhi and as many as 14 other villages in the area is related to the recent forest ‘clearance’ (permission) awarded by the environment ministry this February to the Parsa coal block in the adjoining Sarguja district’s dense Hasdeo Arand forests, one of India’s finest.

In all, the project is to sweep across more than 4,000 acres, an area larger than 3,000 football fields, in the 16 villages, impacting hundreds of residents–predominantly Adivasis, or indigenous communities, also called scheduled tribes.

Forest and revenue officials have crafted this project despite the fact that most of the lands in question are being used by the village communities for farming, common property usage such as for grazing livestock, gathering mahua, tendu leaf (used to roll thin cigarettes), chaar (chironji, or Cuddapah almond) and other lucrative forest produce. The land also includes parcels that are rocky (“chattan-waali zameen”), where, villagers pointed out, saplings would not survive.
 

Source: Forest clearance documents for the Parsa coal block, Korea District Office

 A questionable offset
 
A tale of two ‘forests’: In Sarguja district’s Hasdeo Arand, authorities have awarded preliminary clearance for 1,600 acres of dense forests to be stripped for coal mining. ‘Compensatory afforestation’ for this destruction is to take the form of plantations by the forest department in adjoining Korea district.

 
In Korea district in Chhattisgarh, a forest department plantation of 22,000 trees forms a desolate expanse.  The government counts such plantations as forests, and has made them a key component of its international commitments of increasing forest cover to mitigate climate change.

 Compensatory afforestation purportedly offsets the loss of forests cleared for industrial, infrastructure or other non-forest projects.

This principle, despite facing serious questions about its efficacy and outcomes, gained heft in 2016, when the Modi government gave it the shape of a law: the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act (CAF Act). The government issued rules for its implementation in August 2018.

To the dismay of Adivasi and other forest-dwelling communities, forest rights groups and opposition political parties, the government brushed aside repeated appeals that the new law be made compliant with the land reforms and decentralised forest governance structures laid down by the landmark Forest Rights Act of 2006, and to ensure that communities in whose villages CAF funds would be deployed would have the right of consent.

In the coming weeks, a fund of Rs 56,000 crore ($8 billion) is set to flow under the CAF Act to state governments’ forest departments. This is money accumulated over the years, based on two components paid into the fund by those who are awarded forest clearance permits: the ‘net present value’ (NPV), or a monetary value put by forest departments to the diverted forest, and the cost of raising plantations on alternative land. Such payments are determined by forest officials, and range from Rs 5,00,000-11,00,000 per hectare, depending on the type and condition of the forest being stripped.

“These huge sums of money are nothing to feel happy about,” a senior Indian Forest Service officer told IndiaSpend, requesting anonymity. “I would call it a kind of blood money – since it reflects how much forests we have lost. And you can never recreate what is being destroyed.”

The challenge, however, is not merely of adequately offsetting loss of forest cover. On the ground, the CAF Act will unleash land conflicts and undermine the resource rights and food security of vulnerable rural communities, particularly Adivasis, our reporting on unfolding projects in Korea, Chhattisgarh and Keonjhar, Odisha shows. These two states are among those that will receive the largest proportion of allocations from the CAF.

 A search for land

 Over 2014-18, the central environment ministry issued permits to clear 1.24 lakh hectares of forests, according to an analysis by the Centre for Science & Environment. On paper, an equivalent amount of area, or more, has been earmarked for compensatory afforestation. Yet, “Land on such a large scale is hardly lying around just like that,” said Madhu Sarin, a development planner specialising in forest policy and rural communities. “It is all under some use or the other.”

In this land-stressed country, how are the forest departments finding thousands of hectares of land to create plantations? Forest and tribal rights grassroots groups argue that the land is being siphoned off from marginal rural communities, more often than not Adivasis, whose very survival depends on such land.

In November 2017, the environment ministry issued a direction asking states to “create landbanks for compensatory afforestation projects for the speedy disposal of forest clearance proposals.” On May 22, 2019, the ministry further said that in states with over 70% forest cover, compensatory afforestation projects against forest permits need not take place in the same state, but can be housed anywhere in the country, using land banks.

Rural communities say they experience the state’s bid to bank land as a land grab, as IndiaSpend reported on September 19, 2017, in the weeks before the environment ministry issued its 2017 directive.

“Land banks are serving to invisible-ise Adivasi communities,” Gladson Dungdung, an Adivasi author who has written extensively on land banks and forest rights, told IndiaSpend. “In Jharkhand, over 20 lakh acres have been listed in land banks, including common lands, sacred groves and forest lands. People have no clue, and they suddenly find their land and forests being fenced away, cutting off life-giving access for them and their livestock.”

 
Gladson Dundung (left) during a village meeting on land and forest policies in Khunti, Jharkhand.

The result is “a double displacement”, said Sarin–first for forest clearance, and then for compensatory afforestation.

Parsa coal block’s compensatory afforestation project, which has unfolded over 2016-18, the precise time when the CAF Act and its rules were formed, is a telling example.

 “Mahaul garam tha… hungama ho gaya”

In January 2019, the ministry of environment, forests and climate change controversially awarded the Parsa coal block a Stage-I (preliminary or in-principle) forest clearance or permit, setting the ground for stripping 1,600 acres of lush forests for coal mining. The mine has been allotted to the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Nigam, a state-owned power utility, which in turn has appointed Adani Enterprises Ltd as mine developer and operator, in a move some commentators have criticised as opaque.

The clearance was awarded because the state government showed that a mandatory condition had been met: more than 4,000 acres of non-forest land had been identified for compensatory afforestation in 16 villages in the adjoining district of Korea. This created the impression that forest loss in one site would be made up by planting trees in another.

According to a February 2017 letter by the Korea district collector, submitted as part of the forest clearance application, 1,684 hectares (or 4161 acres) of land which were “free of encroachment” had been identified in 16 villages of Korea. The department, the letter continued, had “no objection” to the land being given to the forest department for CA plantations in lieu of the forest being destroyed for the Parsa coal block.
IndiaSpend travelled to eight out of the 16 villages, and heard a common narrative: villagers said that officials had neither formally informed nor consulted them about the afforestation project. And that they were opposed to such a project, since the lands marked for plantations were privately held or common property land, largely their means of survival and food security.

Despite protests by villagers over 2016-18, officials continued with the plan, which became the basis on which the Parsa coal block eventually secured forest clearance.

A half-an-hour drive from Chhote Salhi is Baday Salhi village, where authorities have marked out 657 acres of land for compensatory afforestation. Residents gathering at sarpanch Ruplata Singh’s home recalled to IndiaSpend how attempts by the forest department to put pillars on farms across the village last year had ended in a skirmish. “Mahaul garam tha.. hungama ho gaya (Things heatened up and it turned into a big fight). We eventually chased them out,” the sarpanch said.

 
Villagers in Baday Salhi said they chased away labourers and officials who tried to put pillars on their lands for the plantation project.

 “They put pillars on our land, right where we do our farming, without asking us, without giving us any information,” said Amar Singh, a villager, “Would we not stop them?” Others in the crowd piped in, “When we asked why here, why not elsewhere, they said they have orders and have to put it where the satellite says so.”

Within days, the villagers uprooted the pillars, threw them away, and resumed farming on the lands. Official documents, land maps and GIS depictions, meanwhile, neatly plot the lands earmarked for compensatory afforestation, giving no indication of these ground contests, or how the land is being used currently.

Korea is a ‘scheduled area’ i.e. a tribal-majority area enjoying constitutional protections, and special laws such as the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act. The law states that gram sabhas (village assemblies) have the power to manage their natural resources, and must be consulted on any plans regarding these. However, in every village IndiaSpend visited, residents reported that officials had not presented any details of the compensatory afforestation proposal to the gram sabhas for their approval or inputs. “Sab manmani se kiya (The officials did it arbitrarily),” said Thaggaon sarpanch Ashok Kumar of the plantation project in his village.

In Bodemuda and Dhanpur villages, where the forest department has marked out 558 acres of land for compensatory afforestation, sarpanch Shiv Kumar Singh said villagers had a vague idea of what was going on. “The local forester and patwari [land revenue official] came and told me that trees would be planted on our village’s lands as bharpai (compensation) for the forest that would be destroyed by Adani’s Parsa mine in Hasdeo [Arand] on Sarguja side.”

Kumar said he told the foresters that there was very little fallow land available in the village. Of what was fallow, most of it was rocky, and would not be suitable for plantations. “I told the officials that tree planting is a good thing. But it should happen after proper meetings with our gram sabha, so that we as a village can tell them where appropriate land is available, and what species of trees would be suitable,” he said.

Echoing accounts in multiple villages, Shiv Kumar Singh, sarpanch of Dhanpur, says officials have earmarked agricultural land of villagers for compensatory plantations for the Parsa coal block without informing residents.

In Gidmudi village, former sarpanch and current zila panchayat member Gurujlal Neti said the local patwari and forest beat guard had come to him saying they wanted specific lands in the village for afforestation. “I told them that villagers have been cultivating these lands since a long time, and without their permission, how could authorities take it for plantations?” Neti said, “They needed to approach the villagers formally.” The officials left, Neti said, and he thought the matter had ended.

Neti and other villagers were unaware that despite their opposition, officials had gone ahead with the compensatory afforestation plans.
In Bari, sarpanch Jaipal Singh similarly said the local forester, Nirmal Netam, had come to him and said trees would be planted in the village under a project linked to the Parsa coal block. “He gave me some documents in English, and asked me to sign. I did so, trusting him,” Singh said, adding that he thought the trees would make the village greener. It was only subsequently, when labourers came and began digging pillars on villagers’ farms, that the exact plan revealed itself. “Villagers started to oppose it and threw all the pillars away,” Singh said.

On paper, however, district officials have finalised 560 acres of land in Bari for compensatory afforestation. Singh was unaware that this had happened despite the opposition. “When officials tell us something, we tend to believe them in good faith,” he said. “But actually they should be coming and doing proper meetings with the gram sabha, and sharing all details of any proposal with us formally, and in a language we can understand.”

The plan was unlikely to be implemented smoothly unless the villagers cooperated, Singh said: “They [the officials] did not involve us when they should have, and villagers will hardly give up their agricultural land like this for plantations. Jamke virodh hoga (There will be strong opposition)!”
In fact, according to Dhanpur sarpanch Singh, residents were so troubled by the pillars on their lands that sarpanches from several of the 16 villages got together to meet the then legislator, Shyam Bihari Jaiswal, in December 2016 to lodge a protest. This meeting was covered by the local media. Yet, over 2017-18, ignoring what the local communities were saying, the forest clearance file for the Parsa coal block kept moving ahead in the state government and ministry offices in Korea, Raipur and Delhi.

 
A December 2016 news report in a local Hindi newspaper reports the  villagers’ meeting with the local legislator Shyam Bihari Jaiswal to protest against the compensatory afforestation project on their land.

 Renewing a historic injustice

 The FRA was enacted to redress a “historical injustice”–to recognise through individual and community titles the customary rights of communities that have traditionally depended on forestlands, but whose ties were denied, and even criminalised, by colonial and post-colonial policies. The CAF Act’s letter and design put it in direct conflict with the Forest Rights Act, activists say, shutting out communities and undermining democracy all over again.

Although enacted more than a decade ago, the FRA remains under-implemented to the extent that a 2017 assessment by the US-based Rights & Resources Initiative showed that just 3% of the minimum potential community forest rights area had been settled through the award of formal titles. Officials have rejected more than 50% of individual and community forest rights (CFR) claims filed by Adivasis and other forest-dwellers. Activists have repeatedly opposed these rejections and even challenged them in court.

“Given that a majority of the land which comes under the Forest Rights Act is yet to be settled, a legislation like CAF poses a serious threat to the pending recognition of people’s rights,” said Tushar Dash, a Bhubaneshwar-based researcher who worked on the RRI study.

The Parsa case demonstrates this. For example, according to the February 2017 ‘no-objection’ letter from the Korea district collector, the over 4,000 acres of land being earmarked for Parsa’s compensatory afforestation project are ‘rajasva van bhumi–chhote baday jhaad ka jungle’, or ‘revenue forest lands, with small and big trees’.

The contradictory nomenclature—i.e., land categorised simultaneously as ‘revenue’ (or under the jurisdiction of the revenue department) as well as ‘forest’ (under the ambit of the forest department)—reflects a deeper mess in the land records of the state revenue and forest departments, as well as outdated land survey settlements. However, the Forest Rights Act applies to all lands categorised as ‘rajasva van bhumi’, officials in Chhattisgarh told IndiaSpend, and communities in possession of such lands and drawing their livelihood from it were entitled to FRA deeds.

 
Residents of Thaggaon village, Samudribai Salaam, Sonmati Orkera, Sampatiya Salaam and Indukunwar Orkera (left to right), return home after gathering forest produce from the village’s forested commons. While Thaggaon is yet to get recognition under the Forest Rights Act for such community forest rights, officials have earmarked 500 acres of land in the village for compensatory plantations.

 In all of the eight villages IndiaSpend visited, villagers decried the poor implementation of the Forest Rights Act, and the daunting process of filing claims. “We submit our claims, but it goes up [to officials] and they just sit on it,” said Singh, the Dhanpur sarpanch. “Most of the claims filed are pending or have got rejected.”

In Gidmudi, the zila panchayat member Neti echoed this, saying, “Most villagers are still not fully aware of their rights, and if they are not accompanied by someone assertive, patwaris and foresters find it easy to brush them away, saying this land belongs to the government, and they cannot get FRA titles.” In Thaggaon village, Rameshwar Das, a member of the village Forest Rights Committee, said, “I help so many Adivasi villagers fill up the forms and provide the required documentation. Their claims get rejected on grounds that some document or the other is missing.”

None of the 16 villages have received community forest rights or titles to the forested commons in their villages.

In contrast to the villagers’ accounts, the official documents earmarking land in the 16 villages for compensatory afforestation say there are no pending FRA claims on the land in question. The document notes that FRA titles had been given on 44 acres in the earmarked land–on average, under three acres in each village. By contrast, more than 4,000 acres have been allotted for compensatory afforestation to facilitate the clearance for the mine.

The Congress party was elected to power in Chhattisgarh in December 2018 with a key campaign promise of implementing the Forest Rights Act. This is likely to intensify the CAF-FRA land contests. In the wake of a controversial February 2018 order of the Supreme Court to evict forest dwellers, which is currently on hold, Congress president Rahul Gandhi asked Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel to ensure the law would be properly implemented. He wrote that rights to land, water and forests were integral to the right to life for millions of Adivasis and other forest-dwellers.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s letter in February 2019 to Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel seeking implementation of the FRA.

Days ago, Baghel tweeted that he had asked forest officials to ensure that Adivasis and forest-dwellers receive their rights to forestlands under FRA. “Such communities can better protect forests, not forest departments,” Baghel wrote, adding, “The Forest Rights Act has not been implemented properly in the last 13 years. We will do it.”

In recent months, the Chhattisgarh government has embarked on a state-wide review of the FRA’s implementation. In Korea district, for example, official figures show that as many as 11,691 or 44% of the forest rights claims have been rejected. Where titles have been given, they have been for a miniscule area–the average size of the holding being 1.1 acres.

When IndiaSpend met Korea’s then district collector Vilas Sandeepan Bhoskar in end-April 2019, he said land for compensatory afforestation for the Parsa mine had been allotted in 2017, well before he had taken charge as collector. He confirmed, however, that the forest department had written to him a few days back asking for a transfer of the land. He asked us to check back with him after he had studied the case.

The high rate of FRA claims rejection was worrying, Bhoskar said, adding that the administration was reviewing all rejected claims and helping vulnerable communities file claims to ensure that no one was deprived of their rights. “Often claims get rejected on technical grounds, or the absence of some document or proof, or because people are not aware,” he said. “But Adivasis and forest-dwellers have been on these lands since ages. We know that. The forest department knows that. Such people are entitled to getting FRA pattas (titles).”

 
A Congress party advertisement during the recent elections promised forest rights for Adivasi and forest-dweller communities.

 When IndiaSpend spoke to him a few days later, Bhoskar said he had written to the state revenue department on May 9, 2019, to seek guidance as he had “limited power as a collector to transfer the land” earmarked for plantations to the forest department. “This is a very large area of land… more than 4,000 acres. If this goes to the forest department, as per the conditions in the forest clearance, its status is to change to ‘Reserve Forest’ or ‘Protected Forest’,” said Bhoskar. He was referring to the standard conditions in forest clearance (permit) documents that the ownership and control of lands earmarked for compensatory afforestation projects must be transferred to the forest department, and their status changed to ‘reserve forests’ or ‘protected forests’.

“Village boundaries, the gram panchayat area… all that will change. FRA claims might also be pending on it since we are reviewing all rejected claims. Keeping all these things in mind, I have written for guidance,” Bhoskar said.

In early June, after just four months in the post, Bhoskar was transferred out of the district.

 A conflict foretold

 The land tussles playing out in cases such as Parsa were foreshadowed through 2015-18, in public and parliamentary debates before the CAF bill was approved into law in July 2016, as well as during the subsequent drafting of the rules by which the legislation will be implemented.

Adivasi groups expressed fears to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the impact of the draft law. Voices within the government raised these issues, too.

For example, documents accessed by IndiaSpend under the Right to Information Act show that the environment ministry received repeated letters from the ministry of tribal affairs asking it to ensure that the new CAF law should not undermine the Forest Rights Act, and that it should provide a just deal to forest-dwelling communities.

In March 2015, in comments sent to the environment ministry on its draft CAF bill, the tribal affairs ministry had pointed out that the bill made no mention of the Forest Rights Act and gram sabha consent for afforestation and utilisation of funds, and showed no commitment to spending CAF funds to compensate those affected by forest diversions. These funds, the tribal affairs ministry said, should be shared with the affected gram sabhas. And at least 50% of the net present value (the monetary value of the forest destroyed as determined by the forest department) component of CAF funds should be spent on Adivasi and forest-dwelling communities. A big problem, the tribal affairs ministry added, was “the non availability of land” to carry out compensatory afforestation on. 

However, the bill was passed without taking any of the above concerns into account. In parliament, the then environment minister Anil Dave brushed off criticism that the act posed a threat to Adivasi and rural communities’ rights. He instead assured the house that “the CAF rules would provide for adequate consultation with the gram sabha”.

Subsequently, in November 2017, the environment ministry passed the order asking state governments to set up land banks for housing compensatory afforestation projects so that forest clearances could be issued speedily. The tribal affairs ministry again protested the damage this would do to tribal communities, since the categories of land that the environment ministry  said be included in the land banks were actually eligible to be settled in favour of communities under the FRA.

Writing to the environment ministry (read the letter here: pdf), it had said the order had been issued “without any consultation with MoTA [the tribal affairs ministry]” and that it “contravened various provisions of the Forest Rights Act.” In particular, the letter said, “the role of the gram sabha has not been given any consideration.”

The tribal affairs ministry asked for the order to be modified to say that land banks should be created only with the informed consent of gram sabhas. It also called for a joint meeting of senior officers of the two ministries “to ensure that the rights of tribals are not affected”.

In the meeting, officials of the tribal affairs ministry reminded their environment ministry colleagues of Dave’s assurance in parliament, the minutes show. The minutes further said, “Officers of the MoEFCC [environment ministry] assured that the commitment still stands. Provision will be made in the CAF rules, which is under preparation, to incorporate the above concern.” (See meeting minutes here: pdf)
However, when the CAF Act’s draft rules were issued by the environment ministry in February 2018, they lacked provisions that would make them compliant with the Forest Rights Act, such as taking the informed consent of gram sabhas in planning and executing afforestation projects, and not undertaking such projects by usurping the individual and community land rights provided for under FRA.

“[T]he CAF rules if operationalised in their current form will lead to harassment, atrocities and crimes against tribals and forest dwellers, and hence to litigation, protests and conflict in forest areas,” Shankar Gopalkrishnan, from the Campaign for Survival and Dignity, an umbrella network of grassroots groups working with forest-dwelling communities across India, wrote to the tribal affairs ministry.

Seconding concerns from Gopalkrishnan and others, the tribal affairs ministry asked the environment ministry in March 2018 to make several changes in the draft rules to ensure gram sabha approval for CA projects, and compliance with the Forest Rights Act. However, the rules eventually passed in August 2018, omitted these substantive revisions.

Adivasi rights groups vigorously critiqued the government’s move. In a letter to the then environment minister Harsh Vardhan, former environment minister Jairam Ramesh dubbed the rules “a blatant breach of assurances given by Dave to ensure compliance with the Forest Rights Act and the authority of the Gram Sabhas”.  The minister Vardhan however replied that the rules addressed all such concerns (see the correspondence between the two former ministers: pdf). As our reporting shows, this is not the case.

 
Baiga tribeswomen in Phulwaripara village in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district protested against plantations in their village in October 2018. They spent 17 days in prison after the local forest department booked them, and are currently out on bail.

 In mid-May, IndiaSpend met with Deepak Kumar Sinha, a senior environment ministry official and joint chief executive officer of the national CAF Authority to ask him about the upcoming implementation of the act, and the conflicts it could spark. Sinha pushed back on the view that the CAF Act violated tribal rights or facilitated land grab.

He said the rules issued last August “had taken on board all stakeholders.” He pointed to the fact that the rules now provide for forest departments to consult with gram sabhas while including CA projects in their annual working plans – an annual document devised during colonial times, by which forest departments plan their activities for the year.

But as the Parsa case shows, this provision fails to safeguards tribals’ rights–CA schemes get finalised as part of forest clearances without consultation with the affected villagers. “What is required in the CAF Act is a clear provision of going to the gram sabha for its deliberation and consent when a CA proposal is first floated, not after it has been finalised, for some supposed consultation,” Sarin said.

“Officials have been routinely seizing the land of Adivasis for mining and other projects in this region without their informed consent as required by FRA,” a land rights activist, working with Adivasi communities for the past two decades in north Odisha’s mineral-rich Keonjhar district told IndiaSpend, requesting not to be named. “It is a fool’s dream to imagine that the same officials will sit down with villagers in gram sabas, and democratically discuss plantation projects. The colonial attitude that forestlands are the property of the forest department and the sarkaar still thrives.”

However, Sinha argued, finding land for compensatory afforestation is a part of the clearance process, while the CAF Act is primarily a mechanism for what follows–afforestation. “The forest clearance proposal comes to us from the state… [the ministry] has to trust what state governments say when they identify a certain area as suitable for compensatory afforestation,” he told IndiaSpend. Sinha added, “At the end of the day, states have to decide how much land they want under forest cover. If they do not have the land for afforestation, then they should not propose forest clearance projects.”

Yet state government documents for specific CA schemes indicate that authorities often allocate land for plantations even when fully aware that local communities have historically used these lands for their survival.

 “We are mountain people…”

 
Adivasi residents in Benedihi village of Keonjhar, Odisha have been in conflict with the forest department over plantations on their shifting cultivation lands. Odisha is set to receive the largest share of CAF money in the country.

 One example of such an allocation is a compensatory afforestation proposal drafted by the Odisha forest department to offset the forest clearance given to the Odisha Mining Corporation’s Daitari Mine in Keonjhar. The proposal notes that the 1,700 acres of land earmarked for compensatory plantations is being used for podu (shifting) cultivation by local tribes, and for grazing livestock. It states that these lands, which it will take over for plantations, will be enclosed with “strong barbed-wire fencing to protect the area from grazing and other biotic interferences.”

The threat of forcible land-use change and disenfranchisement of tribals is particularly acute in Odisha, which is set to receive the largest chunk of compensatory afforestation funds–at more than Rs 6,000 crore ($862 million), it amounts to more than 10% of the national fund, and more than 10 times the forest department’s annual budget. This suggests the extent of the areas over which the government has permitted forests to be stripped.

The greatest number of clearances have been issued in Keonjhar district, a mountainous landscape of dense forests, vast iron-ore deposits, and more than 50 different indigenous communities who depend on local ecosystems for their survival, yet continue to lack formal titles to these ancestral lands.

For example, lands historically under shifting cultivation by Adivasi communities were declared en masse as government lands, a 2005 study by the development planner Madhu Sarin shows. “44% of Orissa’s supposed ‘forest land’ is actually shifting cultivation land used by tribal communities, whose ancestral rights have simply not been recognised,” Sarin’s report said.

Such lands are now being put into land banks, and allotted from there for compensatory afforestation.

Benedihi, a village of the Bhuiyan tribespeople ensconced in the forested Eastern Ghats of Keonjhar, shows how locals are bearing the brunt of policies taking place in the name of compensatory afforestation.Over 330 acres in the village were included in the district land bank by the state government, and then earmarked in May 2016 to hand over to the forest department as part of a 1,700-acre compensatory afforestation scheme against forestland awarded to Tata Steel Ltd for an iron-ore mine.

A map drawn up by the government marks three plots in Benedihi where the plantations will take place. On the ground, these lands are part of a complex forest ecosystem, and the village is using these lands for a diverse food basket of millets, pulses, greens, tubers and roots through methods of shifting cultivation, and gathering of forest foods. The government has still not settled the CFR claims filed by the village in September 2015.

 
An undulating forested patch in Benedihi village has been marked out for compensatory afforestation by the forest department to offset forest clearance awarded to a Tata Steel Limited mine.

 “Forest officials drive up in their jeeps, walk around with their compasses, put these boards in English, and drive away,” said Tulai Danaika, showing us a compensatory afforestation board erected in an undulating forested patch. “They never tell us anything, or ask us what we think. This has happened thrice now.”

The village practises shifting cultivation by communally drawing up the cyclical scheme by which certain lands would remain fallow, and others would be cultivated. “When the forest department comes and unilaterally fences off land in the village for plantations, our scheme gets disrupted,” Lakhman Pradhan, a former sarpanch said.

 
Villagers show some of the forest produce and the indigenous crops they harvest through shifting cultivation.

 “We are mountain people. These are our desi crops grown through podu. These are our forests. These are the resources we live on. If they take it for plantations, we will face hunger,” Hali Dehury, a woman resident, said. Over a half-an-hour walk, a group of women from the village pointed out multiple medicinal plants on the land, and listed the range of crops the village grows through the year.

“Look at our rich forest floor,” said a loquacious Danaika. “Where the forest department makes plantations, you will not see this. Because they plant acacia and sagwan to harvest for its timber, which will go to the towns and cities. But such species are useless to us–they neither give any fruit, nor do birds live in them, nor do monkeys eat them. Our livestock cannot graze around it, even mushrooms do not grow under it!”
Women residents of Benedihi narrate the damaging effects of plantations on their agriculture and forest food systems.

“The experience of Keonjhar and [the adjoining] Sundergarh districts is that vast areas of forest land, which have been used for shifting cultivation by marginal communities like the Juangs and the Bhuiyans since generations, and are their way of life, are getting fenced off by the forest department in the name of plantations,” the Keonjhar land rights activist said. Such land grabs are unfolding in multiple Adivasi districts of Odisha including Kandhamal, Rayagada and Kalahandi, with cases of villagers even moving the National Human Rights Commission, Odisha-based forest rights researcher Sanghamitra Dubey told IndiaSpend.

Dash pointed out that the CAF-FRA land conflicts unfolding in Korea, Keonjhar and countless other sites across India need urgent redressal. Earmarking land for compensatory afforestation was akin to forest diversion in that it pushed a change in land use, he argued. “The established legal principle in forest diversions is that it requires the informed consent of the gram sabha, and the prior settlement of all forest rights,” said Dash. “We argued that the CAF Act follow the same legal standards for plantations as forest diversions, but the government completely disregarded this.”

When IndiaSpend drew Sinha’s attention to such conflicts, he said the CAF Act was not cast in stone and could always be reviewed in light of the experience of implementation. He was echoing an assertion by the former minister Dave, who had said during the passage of the Act in 2016, “I assure the House that in case the rules are not found adequate in addressing the issues (of adversely impacting tribal communities), we will revisit them after a lapse of a year or so.”

Meanwhile, the CAF Act is set to get off the ground with thousands of crores of rupees flowing to state forest departments, and more and more lands earmarked for plantations, as the government pushes through a near-universal forest clearance rate.

“The demand for, and clashes over, land will only get more acute, to the detriment of tribals,” Dungdung forecasted.

Ramesh Sharma, national coordinator with the land rights group Ekta Parishad, seconded him. “The two laws are genetically different,” said Sharma. “The CAF [Act] is bureaucracy-centric and the Forest Rights Act is people-centric. It is a recipe for conflict.”

(Choudhury is an independent journalist and researcher, working on issues of indigenous and rural communities, forests and the environment. Email: suarukh@gmail.com)

This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Centre and also appears here.

First published on India Spend

The post A Rs 56,000-Cr ‘Afforestation’ Fund Threatens India’s Indigenous Communities appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Sixteen villagers in eastern Jharkhand’s Godda district have moved the Jharkhand High Court against the state government’s ongoing land acquisition for this upcoming
power plant by the Adani Group

The petition of the 16 villagers alleges that the entire land acquisition process is “marked by illegalities and irregularities”. The ongoing land acquisition and the latest legal challenge to it from locals is important to Jharkhand–one of India’s poorest states–and the rest of India, because it is the first time the state government has invoked a landmark 2013 land acquisition law for private industry.

Meanwhile, Ramamurthi Sreedhar, a scientist from Environics Trust, a Delhi-based nonprofit, has moved the National Green Tribunal (NGT), challenging environmental clearance to the Adani Group’s thermal power project coming up on this land. The petition cites numerous grounds, including the company switching the water source for the plant from the Chir river to the Ganga river, post-clearance.

Godda Deputy Commissioner Kiran Kumari Pasi, whose office is acquiring the land, did not respond to calls and a text message from IndiaSpend on February 11, 2019, seeking the administration’s response to the villagers’ case in the High Court.

Adani Group representatives had not responded to an email from IndiaSpend, sent on February 11, 2019, seeking comment on the legal challenges to the land acquisition and to the environmental clearance.

This story will be updated with their responses, if either of them gets back.

Controversial project

In May 2016, the Adani Group, led by Gautam Adani, one of India’s richest and most powerful men, asked the Jharkhand government to acquire close to 2,000 acres of land–95 times larger than Mumbai’s downtown Nariman Point business district–in 10 Godda villages to build a 1,600-megawatt power plant fired by imported coal. The Adani Group will sell the power generated in Godda to Bangladesh.

In March 2017, the government said it would acquire 917 acres in six villages: Mali, Motia, Gangta, Patwa, Sondiha and Gaighat. So far, the government has acquired over 500 acres of private land in four–Mali, Motia, Gangta and Patwa–home to the 16 petitioners.

The Jharkhand government has undercut several safeguards in a landmark new law, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (the LARR Act of 2013), to acquire land from unwilling villagers for the Adani Group, according to a December 1, 2018 IndiaSpend investigation. The legal safeguards undermined relate to ‘public purpose’ reasoning, social impact assessment, consent and compensation.

The safeguards were introduced to end India’s century-old legacy of violent land acquisition, replacing it with a “humane, transparent and participative” process. Instead, in Godda, as several villagers told IndiaSpend, sustained protests and pleas, and even gram sabha (village council) resolutions passed against the land acquisition, have been ignored by authorities since 2016.

On August 31, 2018, as local police watched, women farmers from the Santal tribe fell at the feet of Adani personnel, begging them to not seize their land. IndiaSpend reported how criminal cases were filed against some Adivasi and Dalit farmers who protested the takeover of their ancestral farms.

Santal Adivasi farmers fell at the feet of Adani personnel on August 31, 2018, begging the company to not take their land. Credit: Abhijeet Tanmay/Kashish News

Villagers question land acquisition

The 16 villagers who have now moved the High Court are from Santal Adivasi, Dalit and other backward caste communities and include retired teachers, farmers, sharecroppers and agricultural workers. The petitioners said that they and other affected villagers had written “several letters to different authorities highlighting the illegalities in acquisition of land and protesting against the acquisition of land, but not a single response/reply was received.” Aggrieved, they were approaching the court.

The petitioners include Suryanarayan Hembrom, a Santali farmer from Gangta. After Hembrom and other villagers protested the forcible acquisition of their land in July 2018, Adani Group personnel filed criminal cases–including charges of rioting, criminal trespassing, and breaking public peace–against them.

Suryanarayan Hembrom and other farmers are facing criminal cases for resisting the acquisition of their land. Hembrom is one of the petitioners who has moved the High Court.

“The state government is of Adani. The Prime Minister is of Adani. (Chief Minister) Raghubar Das is of Adani. Who listens to us? We had no option but to go to court,” Hembrom told IndiaSpend. “I hope the court will give us justice because our fight is legitimate–it is to save our land, and our livelihood.”

In their petition, the villagers said they want the court to strike down the land acquisition on several grounds, including:

• The state government is acquiring land from farmers for the Adani Group, calling it ‘a public purpose’ project, but this categorisation is flawed. Since the group will sell the entire power generated in Godda to Bangladesh, the land acquisition is for the private gain of the Adani Group.
• The Social Impact Assessment (SIA), meant to assess the costs and benefits of land acquisition was “fundamentally flawed”. These errors include underreporting the number of affected people, “wrongly claiming” that there will be no displacement, not analysing costs to the villagers, such as the loss of land and farming livelihoods and community assets in the villages, including  grazing grounds and water bodies, and excluding the views of villagers who have raised critical questions about the land acquisition project. While the SIA is meant to be carried out by an independent agency, a Mumbai-based consulting firm, AFC India Limited which was given this task, did not undertake detailed site visits and meetings with affected people to prepare the SIA, and acted in a manner that seemed to support the company.
• The public hearings held in 2016 for the project were not “free and fair”. Several villagers were barred from attending it and lathi-charged by the police.
• Documents and notifications around the various acquisition processes and safeguards have not been publicly disclosed, and made available to affected people, as the government is required to do under the law.
• The consent of 80% of the landholders has not been taken, as it should have under the LARR Act. The petition annexes representations by 400 landowners opposing the land acquisition; these representations were submitted to the state government and the Jharkhand Governor in 2017.
• The state government has acquired community land of the villages for the Adani Group “without the consent” of the gram sabha.
• The acquisition “violates” safeguards in the Santal Parghana Tenancy Act–a 1949 law, intended to prevent Adivasi dispossession by placing several restrictions on the transfer of land from farmers.

Last October, Sumitra Devi, a Dalit farmer in Motia village, had broken down while telling IndiaSpend that her land was in the possession of the Adani Group, after the government forcibly acquired it in February 2018. Days after giving the interview, she died. Her husband Ramjeevan Paswan is now among the petitioners.

“The land acquisition processes have been marked by forgery, lies and intimidation,” Paswan said. “There has to be some accountability for this.”

Days after being interviewed about how her land was forcibly acquired, Dalit farmer Sumitra Devi passed away. Her husband Ramjeevan Paswan is now among the petitioners.

The petitioners are asking the court to quash the acquisition of agricultural and common property land, and order the return of land acquired so far to its peasant owners, for many of whom land is the sole source of livelihood. They are also seeking interim relief of a stay on all construction activity, currently underway on the land, by the Adani Group.

“The company should have directly approached villagers, and they would have decided if they want to sell their land,” said Sonal Tiwary, a Ranchi-based lawyer with Human Rights Law Network, representing the villagers. Tiwary said that the government had “misused” the 2013 law to benefit the Adani Group.

“While officials are giving government land to the company on a lease, in the case of the farmers’ land, they are transferring ownership rights to the company,” said Tiwary, “So that the land cannot revert to villagers.”

Green clearance also questioned

Meanwhile, in a petition filed on February 6, 2019, in the NGT, scientist Sreedhar, as we said, has challenged the environmental clearance awarded to the power plant in August 2017 by the ministry of environment, forests & climate change.  

The Adani Group secured environmental clearance for the project citing Godda’s Chir river as the water source for the plant’s annual requirement of 36 million cubic metres. It now says it will draw water instead from the Ganga river in adjoining Sahibganj district. It also wants sub-surface rights to over 460 acres of land for a 92-km water pipeline.

“The withdrawal of water from river Ganga was never mentioned in the EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) or placed before the Public during the public hearing, or before the EAC (Environmental Appraisal Committee) in any of the meetings where the project was considered for appraisal,” said Sreedhar’s petition, “Therefore, the Project Proponent has completely changed the scope of a crucial aspect of the project, after the grant of Environmental Clearance (EC).”

The petition argued that the company gave “wrong data” to show that there is “adequate water” in Godda’s Chir river, in order to secure “speedy approval” for the project, and regulators failed in their duty to analyse and verify claims made in the project’s EIA report.

The environmental clearance granted should be rejected, as per provision 8.1.vi of the ministry’s Environmental Impact Assessment rules, which deals with concealment and submission of false or misleading data, said the petition.

The petition also puts forward other grounds to challenge the project, including the violation of the government’s own guidelines for locating  thermal power plants; these state that no prime agricultural land shall be converted into an industrial site.

In Godda, the plant is coming up on fertile, irrigated, multi-crop lands, and 97% of the villagers depend on year-round agriculture for their livelihood. The EIA report, the petition states, is silent about the impact of the thermal power plant on local communities, and agricultural productivity. The petition states that the EIA and clearance process have also failed to adequately analyse other impacts of the power plant to do with air pollution, plant emissions, groundwater, and fly ash storage and disposal.

The petition also argues that there are a number of environmental impacts of related aspects of the project, which the EIA and the clearance overlook. These include the impacts of:
 

• A 120-km transmission line to transport the power from the plant to Bangladesh, which will cut through forest land.
• A 45-km railway line to transport the coal for the plant from the existing rail network.
• A 10-km road from the railway line to the plant to transport the coal.

Villagers, speaking to IndiaSpend this month, alleged that the plant construction underway since last year was already sucking up groundwater in the area, and their water bodies were running dry. IndiaSpend made repeated calls on Monday to S Kerketta, Director (Impact Assessment Division) in the Environment Ministry but he was unavailable for comment.

(Chitrangada Choudhury is an independent journalist and researcher, working on issues of indigenous and rural communities, land and forest rights, and resource justice. Follow her on Twitter @ChitrangadaC)

Courtesy : India Spend
 

The post Adivasi, Dalit Villagers File Suit In Jharkhand High Court Against Land Acquisition For Adani Power Plant appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Having spent the last five years as a member of the Central Information Commission–the RTI watchdog body–how would you rate the current health of RTI?
I would say 9 out of 10. Our attention naturally goes to the cases where information is not given. But I heard around 20,000 cases in my tenure. In most, I ordered disclosure and my orders were followed. I tried to instil an attitude of disclosure in officers who appeared before me, and I did see a change over the years–in regulatory bodies like the Bar Council and the Medical Council, in ministries like law, environment [forests and climate change], and in the Delhi government. Six million RTI requests are reportedly filed each year in India. This shows how widely the Act is being used. But I would point out that 60% to 70% of RTI requests are either for employee grievance redressal, or entitlement grievance redressal. RTIs are being filed to ask about promotions, pensions. Or for something as basic as a copy of a government order which should already be in the public domain. This shows the scale of misgovernance.

Many RTI activists and transparency advocates might disagree with your ‘9’ rating, and argue that the government has progressively undermined the right to information. For example, by denying information of public significance such as on large wilful loan defaulters, or by not filling vacancies in the CIC.
RTI activists are raising several important issues, and I acknowledge those and even concur with them. On December 10, 2018, I wrote an open letter to the head of the nation, the President of India–my effective boss–asking that the eight vacancies in the CIC [including the chief information commissioner] be urgently filled. More importantly, the quality of CIC orders reflects the quality of appointments. For this, the CIC needs to be more representative. The RTI Act specifies that commissioners should be appointed from fields such as law, media, science and technology, social service, management, journalism, and administration and governance. Why does the government only favour retired bureaucrats for the CIC? Nowhere does the Act state that the chief information commissioner should only be from the bureaucracy. The government should make the next set of appointments, including the chief, from all these other fields. A retired bureaucrat should be appointed only after assessing what he or she has done for the cause of transparency over their career, what is their inclination towards transparency. Information commissions [central and state] have developed an image of becoming the place for retired bureaucrats. The government should put an end to this image. [On December 13, in a landmark directive, the Supreme Court asked the government to disclose details of the applications it has received for filling vacancies in the CIC, while hearing a public interest litigation by RTI activist Anjali Bhardwaj on CIC appointments.]

The government has also undermined the RTI Act by steadily diluting the post of the Public Information Officer (PIO). The junior-most officers, including Section Officers, are servicing RTI requests, while senior officers with decision-making powers have distanced themselves from engaging with RTI requests.
Yes, that is absolutely true. The decision to deny information often takes place at much higher levels, but the PIO, who is a small fry in the entire mechanism, is the one replying to your RTI request. The way I addressed this was to ask the PIO who appeared before me, “Where is the information held up? Tell me, or be ready to pay a penalty of Rs 25,000.” They would say, “Sir, it is not in my hands.” [I would ask], “Then in whose hands is it?” I would then make the relevant official the deemed PIO. That is how I ended up issuing show cause notices to a university vice-chancellor and registrar, a commission chairperson, and the RBI governor. This last case became big news. But I was doing it throughout my tenure in several departments, whenever the need arose.

About the RBI case, which was among the last and most significant ones you heard, you issued a show cause notice to the RBI governor this November for not complying with the RTI Act, and ordered that the information sought on wilful defaulters with loans above Rs 50 crore be disclosed. But the RBI has challenged your order in the Bombay High Court, saying “such disclosure could harm the national economy”, and obtained an interim stay on the order on December 14, 2018.
The RBI’s stand is most unfortunate. Its arguments that information about big loan defaulters is private, and disclosing it endangers national security and harms the country’s economic interests, are absurd. (These are) most unconstitutional and irresponsible arguments. It is just a cover-up for corruption and mismanagement. By not disclosing who the wilful defaulters are, you are hiding the involvement of bankers–that is my suspicion, that you have deliberately supported the defaulting process. Thousands of crores of rupees of public money have been given as loans. Some powerful parties have then defaulted. Why should this information be kept secret from the people? This is a total violation of the Act, a total illegality.

In fact, the issue of loan defaulters is a classic case where transparency is necessary for solving such problems. With non-transparency, you have facilitated darkness to commit fraud, mischief, criminal negligence, regulatory defects and the evergreening of loans. Ultimately the burden of the loan appears to be unbearable. And then you come out and say it is a non-performing asset (NPA). This is not a business secret of the banks, but a business defect.

One purpose of RTI was to question such bad governance. In fact, RBI has gone so far as to violate a prior Supreme Court ruling upholding several orders by the previous commissioner Shailesh Gandhi [directing RBI to disclose information]. The top man of the RBI should be hauled up for contempt of court. But they have taken a policy decision to not disclose. They announce on their website which information will not be disclosed, citing various exclusion clauses of RTI as ‘the enabling provision’. This is totally wrong. Now they have gone to court [against the CIC order to disclose the wilful defaulters list]. A common person might be able to file a 10-rupee RTI application. How will they have the wherewithal to face a powerful body like RBI in the Supreme Court? Is this not intimidation? In such a case, it is the job of the CIC to come to the rescue of the common citizen.

RBI’s response, challenging your notice in the Bombay High Court, also reflects a wider phenomenon of authorities challenging CIC orders in court to avoid disclosure.
Information commissions were supposed to be the site of final appeal. But courts have been turned into a site of third appeal by governments just to avoid giving information. A writ petition was meant to be a tool by which citizens could address the violation of their fundamental rights. Instead, governments are filing writ petitions against Information commissions and citizens, pleading for the non-disclosure of information. Look at the farce! Going by some media reports, there are 1,700 writ petitions filed by the government as of date against CIC orders. The government should ask itself, what message it is giving to the people by filing all these cases. You are aiming at intimidating the CIC, taming it. In some instances, cases are filed making individual commissioners respondents. In one case filed by Gujarat University [here, the university implemented Acharyulu’s order to disclose information on the postgraduate degree of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but also moved the Gujarat High Court for a stay], I have been made Respondents 1, 2 and 3! Respondent 1 M Sridhar Acharyulu, Respondent 2 M Sridhar Acharyulu, Information Commissioner, and Respondent 3, Information Commissioner.

The government’s RTI Act amendment bill is also being read as an attempt to tame the CIC.
The amendment, if passed, will not just tame the CIC and RTI Act, but completely finish it. Currently, under the Act, the term of a commissioner is fixed. The independence of the CIC draws upon making it difficult to remove commissioners. The amendment will end commissioners’ independence and turn them into glorified clerks. Their tenure will be at the government’s pleasure. Citizens should strongly oppose these amendments. The Srikrishna Committee report [on the proposed Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018], which also proposes amending the RTI Act, is another big threat. In my term as commissioner, I saw Section 8.1.J [denying information on the grounds of it being ‘personal information’] of the RTI Act being widely abused by PIOs. Now, in the guise of privacy, the Srikrishna Committee’s proposed amendment will build a watertight compartment around a public authority, which will not provide even a drop of information. It is a very big threat.

How could we strengthen RTI, given these challenges?
The general election will be held in a few months, and citizens need to question political parties about their stand on RTI, and how committed they are to transparency. All political parties should commit to the following in their manifestos: That they will not amend or dilute the RTI Act; that they will implement Section 4 [the suo moto disclosure clause of the Act] in letter and spirit; that they will appoint information commissioners promptly and choose 90% of them from non-bureaucratic fields; and that they will bring themselves under RTI. Citizens should evaluate parties on these aspects before casting their vote. They should strongly resist any attempt to dilute RTI, and file RTI requests, and use the Act for public purpose.

(Chitrangada Choudhury is an independent journalist and researcher, working on issues of indigenous and rural communities, land and forest rights, and resource justice. Follow her on Twitter @ChitrangadaC)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post ’Proposed Right To Information Amendment Will Finish The Act And End Information Commissioners’ Independence, Turn Them Into Glorified Clerks’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On August 31, 2018, Adani Group officials, backed by the Jharkhand police, destroyed the standing paddy crop and uprooted the trees of these Santal Adivasi farmers, in a bid to take their lands for a power plant that will supply electricity to Bangladesh.

“There were eight to 10 police for each of us villagers,” said Sita Murmu, a wiry farmer in her 40s from the Santal community, one of India’s largest indigenous tribes, describing the attempt that followed to take over the villagers’ farmlands, abutting a clutch of mud and brick homes.
 

Santal Adivasi farmers fall at the feet on Adani personnel on August 31, 2018, begging the company to not take their land. Credit: Abhijeet Tanmay/Kashish News

These fertile, multi-crop lands are their only source of livelihood, and the villagers were shocked when the earthmovers began uprooting valuable palm trees and bulldozing the young paddy stalks, laboriously sown weeks ago.

“We begged Adani’s people to stop,” said Santali farmer Anil Hembrom. “But they said our land was theirs now, that the government had given it to them.”

Villagers said they made urgent phone calls for help to Godda’s deputy commissioner (DC) and the superintendent of police (SP). “The SP told us, ‘Go to the local thaana (police station) and lodge a complaint,’” they recalled. “We told him, ‘how can we lodge a complaint at the thaana, when the police from there are here with Adani.’” The DC too ignored their pleas, villagers said, recalling, “She said, ‘Your money (compensation for the land) is lying in the government office. Go, take it.’”

Meanwhile, Adani personnel were casting concertina wire to fence off the land, and a farm pond. Santalis bury their dead on their land, and the earthmovers dug up this clan’s burial site too, the farmers recalled.

Witnessing the destruction, women farmers fell at the feet of Adani’s personnel, pleading with them to spare their land. They wept as they said they could not survive without it.

Onlookers filmed these scenes on their cellphones, and the story was picked up by a Godda-based Hindi news outlet but found no mention in India’s legacy media.  Alarmed by the women’s protests, the Adani team and the police eventually aborted the land acquisition attempt that day.

IndiaSpend sent questionnaires to the Adani Group and Godda DC Kiran Pasi on the morning of November 20, 2018, about the incident in Mali and the broader land- acquisition project. Neither replied. If they do, we will update this story with their responses.

The villagers’ battle against the Adani Group began in 2016, when Mali, 380 km east of state capital Ranchi, and nine other villages around it became contested territory. That was when Adani Power (Jharkhand) Limited, a subsidiary of the Adani Group, told Jharkhand’s BJP-ruled government that it wanted to build a coal-fired plant on over 2,000 acres of land—private farms and commons—in these villages, according to official documents reviewed by IndiaSpend.

The Adani Group is led by Gautam Adani, one of India’s richest and most powerful tycoons. Its proposed 1,600 megawatt (MW) plant in Godda is to be fuelled with Australian and Indonesian coal imports. When complete—the commissioning year is 2022—it will sell all the electricity via high-tension lines to Bangladesh. The proposal for the plant came in August 2015, following a visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Bangladesh. Adani was among the industrialists accompanying Modi, and the agenda featured power transmission.

But forcible takeover of land for the plant—as several farmers in Mali, and surrounding villages like Motia, Nayabad and Gangta are experiencing—was meant to be relegated to the past with the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (the LARR Act). Parliament passed the LARR Act in September 2013 unanimously, an acknowledgement that the 1894 Land Acquisition Act , in force for 123 years, needed to be scrapped.

Forcible state takeover of land and private property for infrastructure and development is a legacy of British India, legitimised by the 1894 law. In post-independent India, this colonial-era law was particularly criticised for being abused by governments to take over private rural land for industry, sparking numerous bloody battles over land, from Kalinganagar to Nandigram. The brunt of this eminent domain—the power of the state to take over private property, citing public purpose—was disproportionately borne by Adivasis. Among India’s most disadvantaged communities, they make up 8% of India’s population, but an estimated 40% of those dispossessed for dams, mines and industrial projects.

The LARR Act provides “additional safeguards for them, such as informed consent to acquisition of their land,” said Muhammad Khan, a lawyer, and Congress party spokesperson who had helped draft the act, and also co-authored ‘Legislating for Justice’, a book on the issue. “The Act also provides for additional compensatory measures of land-for-land for Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis),” he said. “This was an important safeguard, a recognition that the identities and livelihoods of such communities are strongly grounded in land.”

But the Jharkhand government’s use of the LARR Act, we found, demonstrates how a relatively progressive law can end up replicating the colonial predecessor it was meant to negate. This case holds important lessons for Jharkhand, and the rest of India, because it marks the first time the state government has evoked the LARR law for private industry.

In Mali and surrounding villages, IndiaSpend found that the LARR Act’s aim of making land acquisition a “humane, transparent, participative and informed” process  has been compromised.
For government institutions, long accustomed to deploying eminent domain powers with little public accountability, key safeguards introduced by the LARR Act—related to social impact assessment, “public purpose” justification, free prior, informed consent of affected families, land-for-land compensation for Adivasis and Dalits, and transparency and participation in decision-making, have been either undermined, or bypassed.

In a brief conversation with us on 19 November, 2018, Godda DC Pasi defended the acquisition.

“Farmers want the plant on their land,” she said, referring to the government’s acquisition of nearly 500 acres of land in four villages over this year. Asked about protests, in particular by Adivasi and Dalit farmers, she asked us to send her a questionnaire. IndiaSpend did so on 20 November, 2018, but Pasi did not respond, despite two reminders over two days.   

How a ‘humane, transparent, participative’ law is flouted  

Backed by the government, Adani personnel are taking over and fencing off private land and village commons. They are destroying multi-crop farm land, which provides year-round work and livelihood to its owners, sharecroppers and farm labour (right).

On August 31, 2018, Mali’s Santali farmers, such as Talamai Murmu, fell at the feet of Adani personnel, begging them to not acquire their land. “They just took it over like dacoits,” said Gangta villager Ramesh Besra (right), whose land is now in the company’s possession.

When IndiaSpend first visited Mali’s farmers weeks after the violent acquisition attempt of August 31, 2018, their lands had still not been taken over. But villagers were tense about the possible return of Adani personnel and police. Manager Hembrom, one of the landowners, said if that happened, they would “vehemently protest.”

“Land is everything for us,” Hembrom said of the fertile farms, where villagers grow rice, wheat, maize, pulses and vegetables around the year. “Our livelihood, our life, the basis of our identification for every benefit from the state.” Sita Murmu and other women farmers agreed: “We labour on our own land, and sustain ourselves. There is no way we will give it up.”

The villagers were looking at serious economic losses and food insecurity, given Adani personnel had destroyed their standing rice crop, and there would be no paddy to harvest in coming weeks.
 

“With our crop destroyed, we will also struggle through this coming year to get enough (fodder) to feed our livestock,” said Hembrom. Murmu has filed a case in the district court under the Prevention of Atrocities Act against the Adani personnel who destroyed her crop on August 31, 2018. They would have to wait until November to sow the next crop of wheat, said the villagers. On 23 November 2018, farmers told us this crop too was in question: eight days earlier, Adani personnel sent a complaint to the Godda police asking them to stop Hembrom and others from growing a new crop on their land. The company said the government had acquired this land for them.

As the villagers were speaking to IndiaSpend, Bimal Yadav, an aged sharecropper among them, started to weep. “Adani babu, please leave our land,” he pleaded. “We might get by on the money you are giving us for it, but what will our future generations live on? We beg you, please do not take our land.”

The following day, walking through the uprooted trees and damaged crop on her land, Lakhimai Murmu, one of the villagers also broke down. “When we have not agreed to give our land, how can they forcibly take it?” she said. “Why don’t they just kill us first?” She surveyed the field, pointing to small surviving paddy patches here and there, and told her family, “Maybe we can retrieve a little bit of dhaan (rice).”

Villagers in this section of Mali still hold out hope that the government might heed their protests. But Adivasi farmers in the neighbouring villages of Gangta and Nayabad like Suryanarayan Hembrom and Ramesh Besra, have seen their ancestral lands seized in recent months for the plant. “They just took it over like dacoits,” said Ramesh Besra of his farmland in Nayabad. “We could not do anything.”

Hembrom said that in the second week of July, 2018, a day after he had sown his fields, Adani personnel arrived in Gangta with police and began cordoning off land and moving in earthmovers. Hembrom’s farm was among those destroyed. When he tried to protest on his land the following day, joined by other villagers, Adani personnel and officials arrived and tried to evict them, he said.

“‘On which authority’s orders have you come here,’ they asked me,” Hembrom recalled. “We told them, ‘This is our ancestral land. We survive on farming. Should we ask the government for permission to come on our own land?’”

Marynisha Hansdak, a Godda-based Santali reporter, who was with the farmers that day, had been reporting Hembrom’s story. Adani officials who arrived on the scene threatened her to delete her footage, including visuals of them on the contested land, she said.

“I told them I was doing my job of reporting the story and would not delete my footage,” Hansdak said. Adani personnel, she said, responded by summoning the police. Hansdak left with the villagers from the area and took refuge in one of the villages for the night.

Within days, a court notice landed at Hembrom’s house, informing him that the police had admitted an FIR by Adani staff, who charged five Adivasi villagers including him with rioting, criminal trespassing, and breaking public peace. Hembrom is currently out on bail. An Adani spokesperson did not respond to questions by IndiaSpend on the cases filed by the company against the farmers.  

Godda MLA Pradeep Yadav, who has raised questions since 2016 about the project, spent five months over 2017 in prison on similar charges and is currently on bail. “I was questioning the government’s and Adani’s outrageous mili-bhagat (connivance) to profit the company,” Yadav alleged. “So, the police slapped numerous cases on me. Sending their elected representative to prison was a clear message to the villagers to live in fear.”

Suryanarayan Hembrom and other farmers are facing criminal cases for resisting the acquisition of their land.

On a recent morning, a large group of villagers gathered in Mali-Gangta, to speak about the terror they felt. “We have no peace since the company has come,” said a Santali farmer Mohan Murmu. “They have taken away the grazing lands of our livestock too.”  Those who spoke up in solidarity were not spared either, others in the group said. Adani group personnel threatened them, they said, telling them to not join protests, else their land would be taken too.

Both Besra and Hembrom have refused to accept monetary compensation, on the ground that they never agreed to give their land to the Adani Group. The same is true for farmers Balesh Kumar Pandit, Chintamani Shah, Ramjeevan Paswan, and Jayanarayan Shah from nearby villages. A retired schoolteacher, Chintamani Shah has filed numerous complaints since December 2016, listing violations in the land acquisition process.

“When I have been opposing losing my land to Adani since Day 1, and I continue to do so, on what moral grounds can I take that money?” Chintamani Shah asked, referring to the 42 lakh rupees compensation, which he has refused to take, after the government acquired his land in May.

Several villagers brought out  letters, appeals and gram sabha (village assembly) resolutions made between 2016 and 2018 stating their opposition to the land acquisition. These were addressed to a number of authorities—from officials in the district to those in the state capital of Ranchi, to the Jharkhand governor Draupadi Murmu.

The governor has a special role under the Constitution, with regard to scheduled tribes, in particular, in preventing the alienation of land. Governor Murmu’s office did not respond to an IndiaSpend questionnaire about action taken by her office on these complaints.

“Kisise koi sunwaai nahi hai (there is no hearing for us from any quarter),” was a refrain we heard over and over again in the 4 villages witnessing acquisition.

Public Purpose: Farmland for Adani, electricity for Bangladesh
When the LARR Act came to be, India’s minister for rural development, Jairam Ramesh, had argued that the state should rarely invoke the power of eminent domain granted by the law, and instead, opt for the market mechanism. This principle especially applied to land acquisition for private corporations, he argued.

“You want land? Go buy the land,” Ramesh had said, addressing industry at that time.

For its proposed power plant in Godda, however, as per documents reviewed by IndiaSpend, the Adani Group wrote to the Jharkhand state government on May 6, 2016 and August 2, 2016, asking it to acquire over 2,000 acres of land in ten villages of the district. In March 2017, the government said it would acquire 917 acres in six villages: Motia, Gangta, Patwa, Mali, Sondiha and Gaighat. The administration has so far acquired 519 acres of private land in the first four villages. Acquisition notices in the remaining two villages lapsed in August 2018, with the plant’s land requirements changing.

The company secured environmental clearance for the plant in August 2017, citing Godda’s Chir river as the water source. It now says it intends to draw water from the Ganga in adjoining Sahibganj district, and wants sub-surface rights over 460 acres for a 92-km pipeline to transport water. It also wants 75 acres for a railway line to transport coal.

Had the government turned down the Adani Group’s request, the company would have had to approach farmers to purchase their land, and villagers like Murmu, Hembrom and others would have had a say. On March 24 2017, in a 11-page note, which the Jharkhand government has not made public, the Godda DC declared the proposed power plant to be “for public purpose”, which meant it would acquire from farmers the land the Adani Group sought.

The LARR Act defines “public purpose” as covering several infrastructure activities, including power generation and transmission. But villagers point out that the Adani Group will sell all the power generated at the plant to Bangladesh.

“Adani benefits. Bangladesh benefits. How do we benefit?” asked an agitated Chintamani Shah, echoing the views of several farmers IndiaSpend spoke to.

The state has the first right of refusal for 25% of the power generated by thermal power plants built in the state, which means plants are legally obligated to sell 25% of the power to the state, at rates determined by government policy, according to the Jharkhand government’s 2012 Energy Policy. However, since the Adani Group wants to sell all the power generated at the Godda plant to Bangladesh, a February 2016 MoU between the state government and the Adani Group states that the government has agreed to the company’s request to sell power equivalent to 25% “from alternative sources”.

The government has not made its MoUs with the Adani Group public; the February 2016 document accessed by IndiaSpend is silent on the details of this “alternatively sourced” power. “The MoU is between the company and the state government, I cannot comment on that,” said Pasi when asked for specifics.  Officials speaking to IndiaSpend, requesting anonymity, said the company has not provided “clear answers” about where this power will be sourced from and when will it be sold to the state. An Adani spokesperson did not respond to IndiaSpend’s questions on this issue.

The “alternative source” reasoning riles Babulal Marandi, an Adivasi leader and former chief minister of Jharkhand. “How can the state government justify grabbing land from farmers, and giving it to Adani on the grounds that Adani will sell us 25% power from other sources?” asked Marandi. “We can buy power ourselves. The state is already doing it. Why do we need Adani for it?”

An investigation by Aruna Chandrasekhar for Scroll.in in June 2018 revealed how the state government tweaked its energy policy in October 2016, months after signing the MoU, to buy costlier power from Adani. This “preferential treatment”, words used by the government’s own auditors, will result in a Rs 7,410-crore ($1.05 billion) benefit to the Adani Group, Scroll.in reported.

While acquisition of fertile agricultural land to generate electricity for Bangladesh is being called “public purpose”, villagers losing their land for the plant have little or no power. After sundown, electricity lights up Adani’s plant construction site, while the villages around it are swathed in darkness. In Mali and Gangta, on a recent night, people got by with the light of little lamps burning on kerosene, “bought at Rs 50 per litre”, as one villager said.

The 1600 megawatts of electricity generated from the Adani power plant will be sold to Bangladesh. Villages losing their farms and commons to the plant get by on kerosene lamps. The only electricity in the area was at the plant site (right).

“Earlier we used to get power for one or two hours. But since four months, after this company began building its plant here, we have not been getting any electricity,” said a schoolteacher in one of the villages, fanning himself with a textbook as he watched over his wards. “The government is issuing circulars for smart classrooms, and asking us to teach using projectors. And here, children haven’t seen electricity since four months,” said the teacher, requesting anonymity.

A 2016 government report lists even Godda’s district headquarter town as undergoing 18-20 hour daily power cuts.

Social impact assessment silent on impacts
The LARR Act requires the government to conduct a social impact assessment (SIA) to weigh an acquisition’s socio-economic costs and impacts against potential benefits.  

Under the law, the SIA study is required to be a publicly available document, circulated and disclosed widely, from gram sabhas in the relevant villages, to government offices and relevant websites. It must detail the extent of private, common and government land to be affected by the proposed acquisition as well as the number of affected families, including the number of displaced. It must assess whether land acquisition at an alternate place was considered and found unfeasible. The assessment also requires that the government hold public hearings to incorporate views of the impacted families.

The SIA report in this case contravened several requirements, we found. It is not publicly available, nor is it placed on any relevant government websites, such as the Godda district website, or the Jharkhand Land Department website. Few villagers like Shah have a copy obtained  from “sources”.

Although the SIA states that 5,339 villagers were “project-affected”, it documents the views of only three villagers in the Motia hearing and 13 in Baxara. All the views favour the project and mirror each other. The SIA’s account of the hearings do not record the views of any Adivasi or Dalit residents.

Several locals in the four villages where the government was acquiring land for the Adani Group said that on December 6, 2016, the day of the SIA public hearings, they were barred from attending the proceedings. “There was large police deployment around the hearing site,” said Devendra Paswan, a Dalit farmer .

Only those who had a yellow card or a green card issued by company agents–dalaals as the villagers called them–were allowed in by the police, numerous villagers in Mali, Motia, Patwa and Gangta said. Villagers alleged that the police prevented them from entering even though they were carrying voter IDs and Aadhar cards.  

When villagers protested, the police baton-charged and teargassed them, they alleged. Mali resident Rakesh Hembrom said they had no option but to gather outside and protest. “The next day the local paper carried a photo of us with our hands raised in protest, but saying the villagers are in support of the project,” recalled Hembrom.

Residents say they were kept out of the SIA public hearings
In December 2016, several villagers, including women, told a Newslaundry reporter, Amit Bhardwaj, how they were beaten and barred from the SIA hearing site. A local journalist who captured footage of the police violence against villagers in Motia told Bhardwaj the police forced him to delete it.

While the Jharkhand government has empanelled several Jharkhand-based institutions, and public universities, including the area’s Sido Kanhu Murmu University, to conduct SIAs, the SIA for the Adani plant was awarded to a Mumbai-based consultancy firm called AFC India Limited. In the SIA, neither does AFC list the socio-economic costs of the project nor its impact on locals, as it is supposed to.

For example, the SIA omits rudimentary information, such as farming incomes in the area, landholding patterns, the extent of irrigated and multi-crop land, the economic losses for land losers, the impact on women and children, sharecroppers and farm labourers, the extent of common property resources such as grazing grounds and water bodies and the impacts of their loss. The SIA mentions that 97% of the residents are dependent on agriculture, but it does not say how they will get by after losing their land to the plant.

The SIA lists the number of “affected families” in nine villages at 841. But that only includes landholders. Moreover, in the four villages witnessing land acquisition so far, government data has listed 1,328 landholders.

The SIA also claims that the power plant will cause “zero displacement” and that habitations are “very far” from the site of land acquisition. It provides no evidence to support this statement, repeating claims made by the Adani Group in filings to the government, as well as claims by district officials that land acquisition for the project will not displace anyone. The Godda DC’s March 2017 note lists “zero displacement” as one of the grounds for Adani’s plant being a “public purpose” project.

The realities contradict this assertion. For example, the Santali families of Mali, who protested the acquisition bid of August 31, 2018, stand to lose their entire farmland. Their homes abut these farms.

“They may not touch our homes today,” pointed out Sita Murmu, “But without any land, what will we do here and how long can we survive here? We will eventually be forced out.”

In the adjoining village of Motia, at the site of the power plant, the land was being levelled and construction had begun. Construction workers were marking boundary pillars just shy of the walls of the homes of Dalit and Adivasi villagers, such Punam Sugo Devi and Karu Laiyya.

“The company has hemmed us in on all sides,” said Devi. “Where are the poor supposed to go?”

Officials and Adani personnel claim land acquired for a power plant will not displace anyone. But the plant site is enveloping homes of Dalit and Adivasi villagers, such as Punam Sugo Devi and Karu Laiyya (right). “Where are the poor supposed to go?” Devi asks.

“Adani’s people keep telling us every day that we will be evicted from here, this is now sarkar ka zameen (the government’s land),” said Devi’s neighbour Deepak Kumar Yadav. “There is no knowing where they will throw us.” Construction personnel at the site confirmed that they were not taking this area “now”, but, as one said, “it will happen soon.”

Yadav, a landless sharecropper said they were financially hit by the land acquisition, which had subsumed the farms they used to work on – impacts the SIA report was meant to document, but ignored.

“Usually at this time, we would be busy in the fields. But we are without work since the past three months,” said Yadav, adding that they could not even get loans. “Earlier, the moneylender would lend to us against the crop that we would harvest as a sharecropper. Now nobody does so, since they know the land we worked on is gone.”

Sharecroppers and landless labourers say they have lost work and incomes, post-land acquisition

Asked for details of the social impact management and rehabilitation plans—the LARR Act requires these to be in the public domain—Godda’s DC Pasi refused. “That is confidential,” she said. “It contains third party information.”

Land rights expert Usha Ramanathan was a member of the High-Level Committee (2013-14), set up by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to report on the socio-economic, health and educational status of India’s Scheduled Tribes. The manner in which the Jharkhand government was taking land and livelihood from farmers demonstrated how “the idea of who, or what, is the public in ‘public purpose’ has got distorted beyond recognition,” she said.        

Questions of consent
Under the LARR Act, even if the government declares a private project as “public purpose”, it has to secure the “informed consent” of at least 80% of the landholders.

On March 7 and 8, 2017, district officials scheduled nine back-to-back ‘consent’ meetings in the nine villages where 1200 acres of land was to be acquired. The notification did not frame the meetings as a space for villagers to evaluate the acquisition proposal, and award or deny their consent. Instead, the government urged them to consent to the acquisition.  According to the administration, in these meetings, and during the 15-day “grace period” following it, 84% of landowners agreed to give their land to the government. The consent process was finished within a fortnight.

The next day, on 23 March, 2017, the Godda government pleader provided a legal opinion to the district administration: since over 80% of the landowners had given consent, the Santal Parganas Tenancy Act–a law that protects Adivasis–“has lost force”, and “land can be acquired even if the area is falling under the SPT Act”. On 24 March, 2017, the Godda administration issued the 11-page note recommending that the government acquire 917 acres of land for the Adani Group. On March 24 and 25, 2017, it issued LARR notifications for the acquisition.  

The 1949 Santal Parganas Tenancy (SPT) Act was intended to prevent Adivasi dispossession by placing several restrictions on the transfer of land from farmers in the erstwhile Santal Parganas district, now divided into six districts, including Godda. “There is no provision in the SPT Act for the government to transfer land to a company,” said Rashmi Katyayan, a Ranchi-based lawyer, specialising in land matters. To say that the Act had lost force, Katyayan argued, “was akin to legal fiction that benefits Adani.”

The SPT Act gives powers over the village’s common property (gair mazruwa) lands, such as grazing grounds to village heads, not the government, said Katyayan. But such common lands too have been acquired by the administration and are being given to the Adani group on 30-year leases, while titles of farmers’ land are being transferred to the company.

As with the MoU, the SIA report and the “public purpose” reasoning, the government has not made public the recordings and minutes of the consent meeting proceedings or official documents related to consent. It is hard to verify the government’s claim of consent from 84% of locals independently, since it has not implemented a key requirement of the consent process.

According to rules for the LARR Act, reiterated in the Jharkhand government’s own LARR rules issued in 2015, the landowner’s declaration giving or denying consent must be counter-signed by a district official. The rules state that a copy of this declaration, with the attached terms and conditions, must be handed to the affected landowner. None of the farmers IndiaSpend interviewed possessed these declarations.

Instead, several landholders, especially Adivasis and Dalits, said they had repeatedly refused consent for their land being taken. In Gangta, residents displayed copies of a gram sabha (village assembly) resolution sent to the district administration, the state’s energy department and the governor’s office.

“The gram sabha has collectively decided that it will not give any private or common property land of the village to Adani Power Plant…” said the resolution passed at the meeting held on August 31, 2016. “If we need to give up our lives in the process, we are ready for it.” The resolution is stamped as received by the district administration on September 2, 2016.

An August 2016 gram sabha resolution in Gangta opposed giving land to the Adani Group for the power plant. A September 2018 notice (right) by the Godda administration directed villagers to give consent for handing over gair mazruwa (common property) lands to the Adani Group.  

Several villagers alleged that the consent meetings called by the government were flawed and manipulated. “We boycotted them in protest, and have never given our consent,” said Chintamani Shah, adding that he filed right-to-information requests for the consent proceedings and was told that all records have been put on the website. “There was nothing there,” said Shah. IndiaSpend confirmed that was indeed the case.

The official opacity surrounding the project violates several LARR provisions, as well as Jharkhand’s 2015 LARR rules. These rules state: “As early as possible, the government will create a dedicated, user-friendly website that will be a public platform where the entire workflow of each acquisition case will be hosted, tracking each step of decision-making, implementation and audit.” This has not happened.

Officials said that most of the landowners have taken the compensation, which demonstrates consent. Several villagers offered a different perspective. A Dalit landholder in Motia, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution, said that all through, the government presented land acquisition for the Adani plant as a fait accompli, rather than a scenario of free and informed consent.

“My land is surrounded on four sides by that of upper castes,” he said. “Adani’s people told me that I should give the land, else I will be stranded and not get anything. I gave my land and took the compensation of 13 lakh rupees in a state of helplessness.”

Sikander Shah who lost his farm earlier this year, and has taken compensation of around 35 lakh rupees, had a similar account: “Adani’s people told me that if I don’t give consent, I will lose my land, and not get any money. I held out until the very end and finally had to relent.” Shah said that company personnel took him to their office, where he signed some documents. “Laachaar hokay karna pada (I had no choice but to do it),” he said.

Another Dalit famer in Motia, Ramjeevan Paswan, alleged that Adani personnel forcibly acquired his land in February, 2018. “Adani’s officials pushed me, uttering a casteist slur,” he said. “They said if you don’t give your land, we will bury you alive in it.” He filed a case under the The Scheduled Castes And The Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against Adani personnel Dinesh Mishra, Abhimanyu Singh and Satyanarayan Routray. Nine months on, Paswan said, the police are still recording his statement.

Compensating land for land
Perhaps the most serious impact of the Jharkhand government’s use of the LARR Act to acquire land for the Adani Group, results from its interpretation of the land-for-land compensation principle, laid down in the act for Adivasi and Dalit landowners.

Clause Two in the Act’s Second Schedule states: “..in every project (emphasis added), those persons losing land and belonging to the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes will be provided land equivalent to land acquired, or 2.5 acres, whichever is lower.” This compensation, the schedule says, is in addition to money.

On June 14, 2017, the Godda district administration wrote to the state government for guidance on implementing multiple compensation and rehabilitation provisions of the act, specifically mentioning the Second Schedule, as well as the Act’s Section 41, which deals with safeguards for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

Officials were thus deliberating important aspects of compensation three months after they had called meetings in the villages on March 7 and 8, 2017, and claimed to have secured “informed consent” from over 80% of the villagers.

On September 1, 2017, K Sriniwas, the state government’s director (land reforms), told Godda’s officials that the land-for-land compensation clause for Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes “only applied to irrigation projects.” For this, Sriniwas drew on the preceding part of the land-for-land section, which mentions that land-for-land compensation would be provided in all irrigation projects as far as possible.

Sriniwas is no longer the land reforms director. His successor, A Muthu Kumar told IndiaSpend: “I cannot comment on this. It is a policy decision of the government.”

The land-for-land compensation principle is a critical one, especially for Scheduled Tribes. “Adivasis are intertwined with land, forests and nature,” National Commission for Scheduled Tribes Chairperson Nandkumar Sai told IndiaSpend during a land rights seminar in September 2018. “Land is the very basis of their life, their culture and their identity,” Sai said, echoing the views of the Santalis in Godda’s villages.

In a 29 October 2018 note, following a meeting Sai held with officials of the central ministries of land resources, tribal affairs, and environment and forests, the NCST has drawn on the LARR Act’s land-for-land compensation principle to ask the government to award Adivasis, whom it relocates from tiger reserves, a minimum of 2.5 acres of land as compensation.  

The Jharkhand government’s decision to deny land-for-land compensation to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes “violates Article 14 of the Constitution, i.e. the principle of equality before law,” Ramanathan said. “Whether it is an irrigation project or a power plant, the fact of dispossession is the same across projects. Then how can you compensate with land in one case, but not in another?”

Jharkhand was formed as a separate state in 2000 due to decades of collective struggles for tribal self-determination, and that its government should dispossess tribal farmers thus is “particularly ironic,” Ramanathan said. IndiaSpend asked Kumar, the land reforms director, if it was the Jharkhand government’s stand to deny land-for-land compensation in all LARR projects, barring irrigation projects. “This is the government circular as of now,” said Kumar. “I cannot comment on any future circulars.”

Back in Godda, asked for information on how many Dalit and Adivasi families are losing their land to the Adani group, officials say they have not done “a caste-wise analysis” of those being dispossessed.

The land records in Jharkhand have not been updated since 1932. Documents around the project, including the SIA report, seem to be an unreliable guide. According to the SIA, of the acquisition’s “841 impacted families” (it is counting only land losers), Dalit and Adivasi families number 130, or around 15%. But a basic ground check raises questions about this data.  

For example, the SIA lists the number of impacted Adivasi families in Mali village as one. But just one patch of land, which was the target of the controversial acquisition of 31 August 2018, includes 6 families as landowners. Nearly 40 people, across three generations, are dependent on this land. But the SIA states that this land title is reported to be “issue-less”, which means it has no claimants.
Titleholders of this section of land include farmers like Anil Hembrom. Farmers said they would not be able to use the compensation money to buy alternative land, given the SPT Act, which places several restrictions on transfer of farmland in the region. “If the government takes our land from us, we, and our future generations will be condemned to landlessness forever,” said Hembrom. “Our Adivasi existence will be wiped out.”

Adivasi farmers explain why the acquisition will render them landless for good
“Numerous studies, including our report, have shown that communities whose lives are entwined with their habitat, especially Adivasis, have subsistence capability precisely because they have access to natural resources,” said Ramanathan. “If you fence these off from them, you render them immensely vulnerable.”

In Godda, this vulnerability has become a reality for many.

“We cannot even go into what was ours. The company has built a fence all around it,” said Sumitra Devi, a Dalit farmer in her 50s in Motia. Adani personnel threatened and intimidated her family into giving up their land, before eventually forcibly acquiring it this February, she alleged. Devi said her family has not taken the compensation on the grounds that they did not consent to giving their land.
“Humein paise ka moh nahi hai, humein zameen ka moh hai (We have no attachment to money, we are attached to land),” Devi sobbed.“Please find a way for us to get our land back.”

With the land gone, she said, they were struggling to make ends meet, and take care of their 10 cows and calves. She suffered from gastric ailments and diabetes, and did not have enough money for her medical tests and medicines, she said.

On October 8, 2018, shortly after giving this interview, Devi died.

Days after being interviewed about how her land was forcibly acquired, Dalit farmer Sumitra Devi passed away.

(Chitrangada Choudhury is an independent journalist and researcher, working on issues of indigenous and rural communities, land and forest rights, and resource justice. Follow her on Twitter @ChitrangadaC)

Courtesy: India Spend

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