However, the Madras High Court in July 2019 termed a similar law in Tamil Nadu “null and void”, putting a question mark on all three states’ practices, and giving activists a chance to challenge the states in court.

The three states have used these outdated laws since 2014, instead of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act enacted by the central government in 2013. Such state laws should have been repealed or brought in line with the LARR Act, experts said. For the states to continue to use them, they would have to be re-enacted, the Madras High Court order stated. 

The LARR Act of 2013 replaced the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The new law enhanced compensation for landowners, made landowners’ consent mandatory before their land was acquired, and required projects to first study the social impact of land acquisition. 

But even after this, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka continued to use their respective laws–which were based on the 1894 colonial law–to acquire land for high-profile projects including the world’s largest oil refinery in Maharashtra, the Chennai Metro Rail project and an industrial corridor in Karnataka. 
On July 3, 2019, the Madras High Court struck down Tamil Nadu’s use of its land acquisition laws, holding that these laws became invalid the day the LARR Act was passed. The court cancelled all land acquisition carried out under these laws since 2014, except where the land had already been put to use. 
This has called into question the continued use of old state laws in Maharashtra, where it has been unchallenged so far, and Karnataka, where a case is pending before the state high court.

Tamil Nadu had defended its use of state laws in the High Court saying that it had the approval of the President. The High Court rejected this argument. The Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation, the state body that acquires land for industries, made a similar claim in response to our queries. The Karnataka officials did not respond to the specific query on why the old state laws are being used instead of the LARR Act to acquire land for industries. 

After the LARR Act came into force in 2013, states such as Gujarat, Jharkhand, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh enacted amended versions of the law or brought in new rules to bypass its provisions. These dilutions were widely reported and led to protests and demonstrations. But the use of outdated laws by Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka to bypass LARR Act, 2013, has escaped public scrutiny so far. 

“Most states diluted the 2013 Act to do away with some requirements,” said Suhrith Parthasarathy, a Chennai-based lawyer who represented some of the petitioners in Tamil Nadu. “This is not condonable, but what these three states did is even worse–they said the 2013 law won’t apply at all.”

The decisions were taken by state governments ruled by political parties across the spectrum: Maharashtra has a Bharatiya Janata Party government; the Tamil Nadu government is led by the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam; and the Karnataka government that took the decisions in question was led by the Congress, which also led the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre when the LARR Act was passed in 2013.

The old state laws
Land acquisition is on the “concurrent list” of the Indian Constitution: That is, states can make their own laws on land acquisition. Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu used these powers to introduce laws to acquire land for specific purposes such as industries or highways.

The Karnataka Industrial Areas Development (KIAD) Act of 1966 empowered the state government to declare any piece of land an industrial area and acquire it, whether or not the owners wanted to give it. Compensation was to be decided through negotiations between the government and landowners, and in case they could not agree, the Act referred to procedures under the 1894 Act to calculate compensation.

The Maharashtra Industrial Development Act, 1961, and Tamil Nadu Land for Industrial Purposes Act, 1997, carried similar provisions. 

In contrast, the LARR Act requires, as we said, the consent of at least 70% of the affected people in case the land is required by a private firm or for a public-private project. It makes non-landowners such as sharecroppers and farm workers eligible for compensation and rehabilitation, and carries special provisions for Dalit and Adivasi families.

The state laws have none of these provisions. 

After the LARR Act was passed, states should have amended their “very old” laws to bring them in line with the LARR Act’s progressive principles, Himanshu Upadhyaya, faculty at the School of Development at the Azim Premji University, told IndiaSpend. “But it was never done.”
Instead, states did the opposite: They made the state laws exempt from the LARR Act.

Amendments to LARR Act
In February 2014, just one month after the LARR Act came into force, Tamil Nadu passed an amendment to the law as it applied within the state. The amendment inserted a new clause, Section 105A, which said that provisions of the LARR Act “would not apply” to three state laws that govern land acquisition–for industries, highways and for land for redistribution to Dalits.

The President approved the amendment on January 1, 2015. 

These laws were then used to acquire land for highways–for instance, paddy fields and orchards for a bridge in Tiruchirapalli district–and even to take over houses and school grounds in Chennai for the second phase of the city’s metro rail project.

Acquisition under the three state land laws accounts for three-fourths of all land acquisition in Tamil Nadu, according to a 2019 study by the Centre for Science and Environment, a think-tank based in New Delhi.

These acquisitions were met with resistance. By 2018, nearly 150 petitions were filed before the Madras High Court asking for the state’s LARR Act amendment to be struck down. The petitioners included people from “all walks of life”–from farmers affected by an industrial area to city dwellers in Chennai–said Parthasarathy, the lawyer.

In April 2018, the Maharashtra legislature passed an amendment to the LARR Act in the same way that Tamil Nadu did–by inserting Section 105A to exempt the Maharashtra Industrial Development (MID) Act and three other laws from its provisions. In effect, land acquisition for industries, highways, housing and for projects under regional and town plans would not be subject to LARR Act. It was approved by the President the same month.

But even before this, the state was using these older state laws to acquire land. In 2017, the Maharashtra government had issued notices under the Act to acquire land for the Rs 3 lakh crore ($44 billion) West Coast oil refinery in Ratnagiri. The project required 15,000 acres from 14 villages, affecting some 30,000 farmers and fisherfolk.

The proposal met with resistance from the local communities. A number of farmers led by land activist Ulka Mahajan met state officers at the government secretariat in Mumbai in October 2017 and asked why had they used the MID Act when the LARR Act was in force. “They had no answer,” Mahajan told IndiaSpend over the phone. 

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had argued that acquiring land under the MID Act was necessary to give “fillip to industrialisation” in the state, and incorrectly claimed that it had provisions to seek consent.

“The MID Act does not have any provision for consent,” Mahajan said. “It is only when we do an andolan [agitation] that they stop forceful acquisition.”

Due to the objections raised by the farmers, the land acquisition process was cancelled in March 2019, ahead of the general elections in May.

Karnataka, like Maharashtra, continued to acquire land under state laws without passing any amendments to the LARR Act. Between 2014 and 2017, it had already used the KIAD Act to acquire over 4,300 acres of land, according to disclosures to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India.

In March 2019, the state government passed a bill amending the LARR Act, through which it exempted six state laws pertaining to land acquisition for industries, housing and highways. However, the state then issued a corrigendum removing the clauses that exempted the six laws.

R V Deshpande, who as the state’s minister for revenue had introduced the LARR Act amendment, said they issued the corrigendum simply because they did not want any “confusion” between state laws and the LARR Act. “LARR is a central enactment. We did not want any overlapping of that with the state laws,” Deshpande said. “The clause would have caused confusion and we wanted to avoid that. So we withdrew that clause.”

This has no effect on the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Act, 1966, he said. “The point of amending the LARR was only to speed up acquisition of land for defence projects or other projects where land remains with the government,” he added.

Deshpande, who resigned after the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) coalition government lost majority in the state legislature in July 2019, said he was not aware of the Madras High Court order.

Karnataka government officials said they still use the KIAD Act. “Yes, we are using the KIAD Act. There are four to five projects for which acquisition is underway,” said B Venkatesh, special deputy commissioner in charge of land acquisition for Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB), which has powers under the KIAD Act to declare any land as an industrial area and acquire it from landowners. Any government agency or private company that requires land for industries approaches the KIADB to carry out the acquisition. When asked why the KIADB is not using the LARR Act, Venkatesh said, “KIADB is an autonomous body.”

He did not name the projects for which land is being acquired.

One such project is well-known: the Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited’s refinery, which wants 960 acres of land in its surrounding areas. Land is being acquired by the KIADB under the KIAD Act. It issued notifications to acquire the land in January 2017. The acquisition is still pending due to ongoing protests from landowners, who have demanded that the LARR Act be applied so that a social impact assessment can be done.

In case of disputes, the compensation would be determined by a special civil court as per the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, Dakshina Kannada district collector told the press in November 2018. This is because the KIAD Act says that all disputes are to be settled in terms of provisions of the 1894 Act.

B Venkatesh, the land acquisition in-charge of KIADB, confirmed this to IndiaSpend. “In case of any disputes, we are guided by the Land Acquisition Act, 1894,” he said. In contrast, under the LARR Act, disputes are to be settled by an independent LARR Authority.

The Karnataka court order
In Karnataka, a single judge of the high court had, in April 2017, ordered the state to stop acquiring land under the KIAD Act. But this was stayed by another bench of the court, after the state government petitioned it the same month.

The Madras High Court order would now be a shot in the arm for the petitioners in Karnataka, said an activist associated with the case, who did not wish to be named because the case is in progress.

The Madras High Court’s verdict, on July 3, 2019, said that it was improper for the state to “revive” the old laws by amending the LARR Act.

The state had argued that their amendment was valid because it was approved by the President. The court disagreed and said that the state laws had already become invalid in 2013 when the LARR Act was passed. This is because under Article 245 of the Constitution, when a new central law is passed on a subject under the Concurrent list (on which both states and the central government can make laws), all existing state laws that have provisions contrary to the central law automatically become void. (States can, however, make amendments to the central legislation.)

“Merely by inserting Section 105-A in the New Act,” the states could not revive three state enactments, the court said. 

It went on to cancel all land acquisition carried out using the state laws since 2014, except in cases where the acquired land was already put to use.

The order has been hailed by land rights activists as a precedent for challenging the LARR Act amendments passed by Maharashtra and Karnataka. 

Maharashtra has continued to use the MID Act despite the Madras High Court judgement. The state has now introduced an amendment to the MID Act that brings the compensation at par with the LARR Act, and expands the definition of affected persons, Smita Chaware, general manager (legal) of the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation, said. The amendment is awaiting the President’s assent.

But approving it may still be challenged in the court.

“In order to revive these acts, the State must re-enact these statutes, in accordance with Article 254(2) of the Constitution of India, and obtain the assent of the President,” the Madras High Court order read.

When asked about this, Chaware disagreed and said, “The whole Act does not have to be reenacted. That’s a misinterpretation of the court’s judgement.”

The Maharashtra laws would soon be challenged before the Bombay High Court using the Madras High Court order as a precedent, said Madhuresh Kumar, convenor of the National Alliance of People’s Movements, a coalition of land rights movements that has campaigned against the use of state laws.
“All three states have violated the central Act,” Kumar told IndiaSpend. “And the Centre had given its silent consent.”

(Nihar Gokhale is a writer with Land Conflict Watch, an independent network of researchers and journalists documenting ongoing land conflicts across India.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post How Maharashtra, Karnataka & Tamil Nadu Use Outdated State Laws To Acquire Land appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Homes of fisherfolk in Chhota Barda village in Madhya Pradesh’s Barwani district, submerged at the 134 metre level of Sardar Sarovar Dam on August 27, 2019. The Madhya Pradesh government had warned in May 2019 that about 6,000 families would be submerged if the Sardar Sarovar Dam is filled to its full height of 139 metres. But the central government went ahead.

Clothes and kitchenware packed in old sarees were placed outside. The house next door in Nisarpur village was half submerged under the rising waters of the Narmada. The ground floors of most shops in a parallel lane were under water, and moss-covered. Streetlights stuck out of the water at odd places, as people scurried from one lane to another to help others load their belongings onto a pick-up truck. 

On the other bank of the swelling river, in Chhota Barda village, four government officers hunched over a low table. Facing them was a queue of more than 100 people who stood clutching rolls of letters and documents that prove their identity.

As people walked to the table, the officers noted down their names and asked questions to determine why they had not left the village–they should have been rehabilitated long ago because their village fell in the submergence zone–a large area which would be flooded once the Sardar Sarovar Dam, about 140 km away in the neighbouring state of Gujarat, was filled up to its full height of 138.68 meters, roughly as tall as a 40-storey building. 

Officials assess the number of people living in submergence areas at an impromptu state government camp on August 28, 2019, in Chhota Barda village in Madhya Pradesh’s Barwani district.

As the rains arrived this year, the central government decided to completely fill up the dam for the first time since its construction was completed in 2017, letting the Narmada’s waters rise. When the water level touched a record 134 meters on August 28, 2019, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi put out a tweet describing the water level as “historic”.

The Modi government has claimed since 2014 that every single family from the dam’s submergence zone has been rehabilitated at new locations. However, as our reporting from Madhya Pradesh shows, at least 6,000 families–based on the state government’s own estimates–have been living in the soon-to-be submerged area in the state, waiting to receive final rehabilitation payments. The central government knew about these families when it decided to fill the dam to capacity, from a letter the Madhya Pradesh chief secretary wrote to the Centre in May 2019, which IndiaSpend has reviewed.

Across villages along the Narmada, people continue to live in houses which will be partly or fully submerged once the water level in the Sardar Sarovar dam touches 138.68 metres.

The Sardar Sarovar Dam, which is expected to irrigate farmlands in arid western Gujarat and Rajasthan, and generate electricity for Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, has faced one of the most persistent and iconic anti-dam struggles in the country, and indeed the world.The dam is estimated to have displaced at least 32,000 families from their homes in the river-side villages of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, 73% of the total families affected being in Madhya Pradesh.

Source: Narmada Control Authority 

There is “not a single success story” of rehabilitation in the history of large dam projects in India, said Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the research organisation South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People. “They expect people to move away or be evacuated for law and order,” he said. Earlier, Pong Dam in Himachal Pradesh was filled up without full rehabilitation of the people affected, he said. “At that time, [cabinet minister] Morarji Desai had publicly told people that the dam was going to be filled up and it was in the people’s best interests to move out on their own.”

As the Narmada swelled and flooded homes–and photographs began to circulate on media–the government of Madhya Pradesh swung into damage-control mode. It set up camps such as the one in Chhota Barda village in Barwani district that we visited, where hundreds had turned up to complain about incomplete rehabilitation, though it was supposed to conclude by June 2005, as per the estimate of the Narmada Control Authority, a central government agency that is responsible for operation of dams on the Narmada and the rehabilitation of the families affected.

On September 5, 2019, a video tweeted by Narmada Bachao Andolan showed a displaced person, from Dhar district, who had attempted suicide.

On September 3, 2019, the Madhya Pradesh government called for an urgent meeting, warning that “there is substantial amount of relief and rehabilitation going on in the affected areas of Sardar Sarovar”.

Why people could not leave

Most of the houses in Chhota Barda, where the Madhya Pradesh government (now led by Congress party) has set up the camp, had numbers written in red near their doors to indicate where the river water would reach once the dam was filled to its full height of 139 m. 

A few meters away from the camp, 50-year-old Ramesh Jadam weighed his options as the Narmada inched ever closer to his two-room mud-walled house, where he lives with nine family members including three sons, one daughter and a grandson. His doorstep read 139.

In 2008, the Madhya Pradesh government, then led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for three years, which would remain in power in the state for another seven years, allotted Jadam a 5,400 sq ft plot in a nearby resettlement area to build a house. The plot is almost as big as his current house but he received only Rs 1 lakh as compensation, he told IndiaSpend, an amount barely enough to lay the foundation of the new house.

So, Jadam said, he waited for another compensation package of Rs 5.8 lakh that the state government announced in 2017. That amount never reached him. So he could not leave the village. 

Ramesh Jadam, 50, weighed his options as Narmada waters inched ever closer to his two-room mud-walled house in Chhota Barda village, where he lives with nine family members. In 2008, Jadam was allotted a 5,400 sq ft plot in a nearby resettlement area, but he received Rs 1 lakh in compensation, which he said was inadequate. He continues to wait for the further Rs 5.8 lakh that the Madhya Pradesh government announced in 2017.

Neighbours in a house down the slope were evacuated by the local administration in a frenzy one week before we visited on August 27, 2019. Jadam’s family is the only one left in this part of the village. “It looks like they [the government] have given up on us,” he said. He would have nowhere to go to when the waters reached his doorstep.

The Madhya Pradesh government scheme that Jadam was waiting for was the government’s last attempt at concluding the long-awaited rehabilitation for people affected by the Sardar Sarovar dam. According to a central government order of 1979, all affected families are entitled to alternate land for housing and agriculture. Apart from this, families are entitled to cash compensation for their lands based on the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, and other cash benefits. Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, over time, extended additional benefits to the people being rehabilitated within their territories.

In 1994, seven years after construction of the dam began, the Narmada Bachao Andolan filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court asking for the dam to be scrapped. They expressed concern that thousands of families would be rendered homeless.

The court, however, ordered in 2000 that the project would continue but only after people living in the corresponding submergence area were rehabilitated. For example, to build up to 100 m, the government would have to complete the rehabilitation of all the families whose homes and lands would be submerged at that water level.

Over time, most families received alternate land for housing, but the cash compensation was too little for many families to build houses there, so they continue to live where they were. In May 2017, just a month before the central government ordered the floodgates closed to fill the dam to capacity, the Madhya Pradesh government published a list of 18,000 families that were still living in the submergence area, and in August that year, announced a special cash package of Rs 5.8 lakh to each family.

Some received it, some did not. During our visit, the villagers showed us letters from the state government dated August 16, 2019, addressed to about 20 families in Chhota Barda informing them that they would be paid the amounts soon. This was when dam waters were already entering their homes.

Jadam did not receive the amount, he told IndiaSpend.  

Damage control

In Chhota Barda, people who had not received the Rs 5.8 lakh package included fisherfolks who lived closest to the river. When the dam began to fill up, the local administration sent pick-up trucks to evacuate them. Their goats, chicken, utensils, boxes and other household effects were loaded on the trucks and transported to the rehabilitation area in the neighbouring town of Anjad.

Here, about 100 families now live in rows of sheds constructed out of corrugated metal sheets. The local government gives them three meals a day, but people have no source of income. 

“The food is alright. But what kind of a life is this?” said Gaju Nanuram, a 65-year-old fisherman. “We have no money or work. It is like living in a jail.”

About 100 families now live in sheds made of corrugated metal sheets in Anjad, after being evacuated from their homes in Chhota Barda as the Sardar Sarovar dam began to fill up. The local government gives them three meals a day, but people have no source of income. 

The district collector, Amit Tomar, said this was a temporary measure to house people who had nowhere else to go. He said rehabilitation is the responsibility of the state government and the district administration is evacuating people whose houses were going to be submerged so as to prevent the situation from getting out of control.

One government employee managing the site said they had no definite orders from the government about how long the camp would be run. He requested not to be named. 

The central government knew there could be crisis on the ground but still decided to fill up the dam, official documents show.

In May 2019, following the demand by the BJP-led Gujarat government that the dam be filled to capacity to conduct safety testing, the chief secretary of Madhya Pradesh wrote to the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), that 6,000 families continued to live in the submergence area of the dam, while another 10,000 families’ cases were still being heard at grievance redressal forums. IndiaSpend has reviewed this letter. 

The number of people still living in the submergence area as per the chief secretary’s letter is at odds with that of the NCA. Way back in 2015, the authority had declared that all 32,000 families affected by the dam had been rehabilitated. Its website still states that there are “nil” families remaining to be resettled. 

The minister for Narmada Valley Development in the Congress party’s Madhya Pradesh government, Surendra Baghel, has alleged that he discovered that the earlier government had misreported the ground situation and had in fact not sought the necessary funds from the Gujarat government.

Medha Patkar, convener of Narmada Bachao Andolan, alleges that even the present Madhya Pradesh government has not taken action against those who had reported the “zero balance” figure. “What was the meaning of that figure when they were still giving out compensation [in 2017]?” she told me. 

Patkar was on an indefinite hunger strike near the river in Chhota Barda when we visited. She had demanded that the floodgates of the dam be opened and the rehabilitation process be completed. On August 28, 2019, Madhya Pradesh home minister Bala Bachchan came along with the district collector to the camp to assure Patkar that the state cabinet would meet soon to take “whatever decisions are within our power”. 

“When you were in the Opposition you sat with us in protest,” Patkar replied. “But now you are not showing the same energy.”

It is only the Narmada Control Authority that has the power to decide whether to open the floodgates or to let the dam fill up as per schedule. Documents that IndiaSpend reviewed showed that the authority has approved the filling up of the dam to its full level by October 31, 2019. 

Mismanagement at Narmada Control Authority

The Indore-based Narmada Control Authority, which is headed by the secretary of the central government’s department of water resources, has four members including one executive member. One of them is supposed to be appointed by the central government to oversee the rehabilitation process. This post has remained vacant since April 2019 and is currently held as an additional charge by Suman Sinha, who also holds the charge for three of the four member posts.

She declined to meet with IndiaSpend, as did Mukesh Sinha, the executive member. Neither responded to a detailed questionnaire sent to them. At the authority’s office on August 29, 2019, officers scurried in and out of meeting rooms. They had received a letter from the Centre’s water resources department to answer the allegations raised by the Narmada Bachao Andolan, including the fact that thousands had not been rehabilitated. The letter, which IndiaSpend saw, was marked “TOP PRIORITY”.

Meanwhile, homes continue to be submerged as the dam level rises. “It is impossible to believe this,” said 42-year-old Suresh Pradhan, a shopkeeper in Nisarpur village, which has the highest number of Sardar Sarovar dam-affected persons of any village in Madhya Pradesh.

Suresh Pradhan (in blue shirt) gestures towards the market in Nisarpur, Madhya Pradesh, where his shop lies submerged.

Pradhan said that although the additional compensation package of Rs 5.8 lakh may seem little to build a house, every adult member of a family was entitled to it. So a family with one father and three other adults would receive Rs 23.2 lakh. Pradhan too was waiting for the money, but he was told last month that he was not eligible because his house was just a few metres above the submergence level, which is marked in yellow on the road.

The two-storey house his great-grandfather had built would be like an island surrounded by water, Pradhan said, and there would be no point living there.

The local school had shut down some time ago, and he had been told that water and electricity supply would be cut off too. “Now they [government] say that I am not eligible for package because my house will not submerge,” he said. “But believe me, when the waters rise they will come in boats to evacuate me.”

Suresh Pradhan (right) stands outside his home that was built by his great-grandfather. The yellow mark on the road shows where the water would reach once the Sardar Sarovar fills to capacity.“Now they [government] say that I am not eligible for package because my house will not be submerged,” he says. “But believe me, when the waters rise they will come in boats to evacuate me.”

Back in Chhota Barda, the officers at the rehabilitation camp said the camp would be extended for a couple more days given the large number of people turning up. “This is just for show,” Vikram Singh, who had come to get his name added to the list of people yet to get the complete rehabilitation package, told IndiaSpend. He sat on the ground with his papers because there was no more space in the queue. “They have all our names already but still make us come here to repeat.” 

An officer who overheard this glared at Singh and told him that he should have been satisfied with the Rs 1.5 lakh compensation he had received 10 years ago. “My father built a house for that much, that too near Indore,” the officer argued. 

Singh looked agitated. “They just want to fill up the water, so that once and for all we will be gone,” he said. “Like getting rats out of a rathole.”

(Nihar Gokhale is a writer with Land Conflict Watch, an independent network of researchers and journalists documenting ongoing land conflicts across India.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Centre Fills Up Sardar Sarovar Dam Even As State Warns Thousands Still In Submergence Area appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Rambhau Kamble (left) was five years old when he heard B R Ambedkar at a rally urging dalits to occupy grazing lands. Kamble, 80, still occupies the land in Gharegaon village in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district. More than 11,000 dalit families in the state are currently encroaching upon grazing land spread over an area the size of Pune and Bengaluru combined, in one of 31 conflicts over land involving about 92,000 dalits–India’s most landless community.

“Every dalit from the region was there,” Kamble, now a frail 80-year-old, recalled at his one-room house in Gharegaon village in the southeastern Maharashtra district of Osmanabad.

Kamble is among the nearly 100,000 dalit farmers who heeded Ambedkar’s call and occupied grazing land, termed ‘gairan’, across Marathwada. At its peak in 1991, the movement occupied 100,000 hectares of land–the equivalent area of today’s Pune and Bengaluru put together.
In 2019, the movement is as real as it was in 1941 for Rambhau and 11,000 other dalit families in Marathwada, a region of 64,590 sq km, about half the geographical area of Tamil Nadu. They still occupy government land because seven decades of land reforms and government programmes aimed at providing land to dalits and other historically oppressed communities didn’t quite work.

Almost 60% dalit households did not own any farmland in 2013–the latest year for which figures are available–according to the India Land and Livestock Holding Survey. Nearly 70% of dalit farmers are labourers on farms owned by others, according to Census 2011.

Ambedkar, who belonged to a dalit community from western Maharashtra, argued that rural dalits should be given cultivable land controlled by the government and commons, such as grazing land. At the Marathwada rally in 1941, he urged dalits to capture public land in villages and cultivate it. By doing so, he said, they could become self-sufficient farmers.

Across 13 Indian states, there are 31 conflicts involving 92,000 dalits who are fighting to claim land, according to Land Conflict Watch, a network of researchers that maps and collects data on land conflicts in India. The wilful occupying of government land in Maharashtra has spread to Punjab, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In Bihar, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, land titles given to dalits over the years in land-redistribution programmes are useless because higher castes, who originally owned the land, never ceded control.

After Independence in 1947, Indian states, which alone have the right to pass land legislation, introduced laws aimed at breaking down large landholdings of zamindars or feudal landlords, and distribute the surplus land so generated to the landless, including dalits.

However, the implementation of land reform laws has been poor because no government is willing to antagonise landowners, who are from dominant castes, said T Vincent Manoharan, chairperson of the National Federation of Dalit Land Rights Movement, an umbrella group of more than 100 grassroots movements.

Politicians blame bureaucrats for not implementing the laws properly, while bureaucrats allege interference from politicians, who are, often, large landowners themselves. “But when a mega project is proposed, they easily acquire land, no matter who it belongs to,” said Manoharan.
Once called untouchables, now officially ‘scheduled castes’, dalits were compelled to work in professions defined by the Hindu caste system. The jobs of dalits–a name derived from the Sanskrit word for oppression–included cleaning toilets, handling cattle carcasses, making leather, and farm labour. They were barred from entering temples, and drawing water from wells used by the people of higher castes. They were not allowed education or to own land. Many of these restrictions still stand.

The struggle in Marathwada
Kamble’s neighbour, Sunanda Kamble (no relation), is a 50-something cheerful woman in a green saree and a large vermilion mark on her forehead. She clearly remembered the day in 1989 when she and a few other women held sickles and walked to unproductive grazing land in the village.

They had heard on the radio that dalits were occupying gairan land. Sunanda’s relatives, who were visiting from the neighbouring district of Beed, told her that they had occupied some land and encouraged her to do the same.

On the gairan, Sunanda and other women dug furrows with sickles and planted jowar (sorghum) seeds. A few weeks later, the seeds sprouted. Eventually, the village’s dalits divided 22 hectares of the 32-hectare spread of gairan among themselves, depending on how much seed and labour each was able to afford. This was the third time that dalits in Gharegaon occupied gairan land.

Sunanda Kamble was among the dalit women who, in 1989, occupied the gairan (grazing) land in Gharegaon village in the southeastern Maharashtra district of Osmanabad. She had heard from her relatives from the neighbouring Beed district that the occupation movement was picking up again.

The occupation of public land in Marathwada has come in waves. The first one was in the 1940s, following Ambedkar’s call. Another took place in the ’60s and ’70s under Dadasaheb Gaikwad, a popular dalit leader and a close associate of Ambedkar. In 1978, the state government issued an order regularising all encroachments made until then.

The dalits kept occupying land, partly because they had frequently abandoned some due to the region’s notorious droughts and pressure from the local administration, often from higher castes.

Kamble’s family, for example, had first occupied the gairan in 1945 but a drought in the following year had forced the family to move to Mumbai to work as daily wage labourers. They came back and occupied the land again in the ’70s but had to give it up again after, as Rambhau put it, “pressure from the upper-caste landowners”.

In 1991, two years after Sunanda and others occupied land, the state government agreed to the dalit land rights movement’s demand to regularise occupied land. It issued an order stating that land titles would be given to those who could prove encroachment for at least one year before April 14, 1990, Ambedkar’s birth anniversary.

Between 1978 and 1991, 84,230 people occupied nearly 100,000 hectares of gairan across Maharashtra, according to an estimate in the government order.

But most farmers did not have proof that they were in possession of the land, said Ashruba Gaikwad, district convenor of the Jamin Adhikar Andolan (land rights agitation), a movement that has helped about 35,000 dalits with the paperwork required to file for land titles. In the absence of official evidence, the Andolan helped people like Sunanda Kamble obtain affidavits from village elders, grazers and helpful farmers, certifying they had occupied the land.

The government, however, insisted on using only official records, such as encroachment notices from revenue officers or police complaints, Gaikwad said. Not all occupiers had been penalised, and in many cases farmers had not saved the paperwork, so they missed their opportunity.
Another reason for the recurring land-occupation drives in Maharashtra is the state’s failure to implement its land reform law–the Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Ceiling on Holdings) Act, 1961. The law set an upper limit to the size of land one could possess. Any land above the limit would be taken over by the state and distributed, first to tenant farmers cultivating the land and then to landless dalits and adivasis (tribals).

But by March 2001, just 2% of the farmed area in Maharashtra had been declared surplus–among the lowest nationwide–according to a 2007 Planning Commission report. Landlords in Maharashtra avoided having their landholdings declared surplus by using false documents, partitioning land among family members, understating the extent of land owned and showing underage sons as adults, according to a 2005 study by the government-run Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration.

As a result, Maharashtra had distributed land to just 41,039 dalit households, according to 2008 ministry of rural development data, the latest available. That benefitted 5% of 854,000 landless dalit households in the state as per the 2011 socio-economic and caste census.
Dalit farmers such as Kamble, who neither received surplus land nor could get occupied land regularised, are not eligible for bank loans, crop insurance, electricity connections for irrigation pumps or drought relief.

On learning that the Nizam of Hyderabad, who ruled Marathwada then, had in 1948 probably issued a decree regularising all encroachments on grazing land, a few dalit farmers from Gharegaon one day in 2017 went to the block administration office, bribed the peon to dig out Nizam-era records, written in Urdu, and spent a whole day poring over the dusty files. But they could not locate any files on the encroachments.

Over the decade to 2019, dalit farmers have held a number of protests in the state capital, Mumbai, and the national capital, New Delhi. They have submitted letters to the chief minister and district collectors, detailing the area they occupied and the crops under cultivation, and attached photographs of themselves standing in front of their harvests. In the letters, they have asked for title in the name of both husband and wife, and requested irrigation facilities. One 2018 letter makes the plea: “Please help increase the national food output by securing the livelihood of gairan encroachers.”

In desperation, some of those who have occupied gairan have begun to petition the administration to urge action against themselves, so that it creates the official evidence they never had. A representation made by Gharegaon’s dalit families asks the block office to send inspectors to the land, prepare a panchnama, or official record, of evidence of crops under cultivation and impose penalties on them.

“Can you imagine a person pleading the government to prosecute him?” asked Arvind Kamble, one of the encroachers. “This is our situation now.”

Across states, similar challenge–and a few solutions
As many as 81% of dalit farmers in Maharashtra were agricultural labourers, who had no land of their own and worked on others’ farms land as opposed to 49% of landless farmers among non-dalits, according to Census 2011. In at least three other states with a larger proportion of landlessness, dalits have similarly occupied government land.

In 2014, the dalits of Punjab’s Sangrur district–where 90% of dalit farmers are agricultural workers–occupied 6,475 hectares of vacant land and asked the government to give them titles. In Punjab, dalits constitute a third of the population, the highest in India. They have accused the state of not implementing laws that reserve public land for dalits for farming and building homes. The protesters, organised under the Zamin Prapti Sangharsh Samiti or ‘movement to obtain land’, have threatened to intensify their occupation drives, if land is not lawfully granted to them.
In Kerala, where 93% of dalit farmers are farm labourers, dalits and adivasis occupied parts of a 25,000-hectare rubber plantation in Chengara in the southern district of Pathanamthitta in 2007. They point to two flaws in the state’s 1963 land reforms, which are otherwise considered a success. The reforms only covered “intermediaries”, such as tenants, who were typically upper caste, and not farm labourers, who were dalits or adivasis. The reforms also exempted plantations from giving up excess land. That meant large estates, like the one at Chengara, could not be distributed to the landless.

In 2012, more than 22 hectares of government land in Arippa in Kollam district of Kerala were occupied by dalit families, who discovered that the land, which was earmarked to be distributed to them, was being instead allotted to a dental college and a university campus.

In 2017, landless dalit women in Tamil Nadu’s Vellore district–where 87% of dalit farmers are landless–occupied a one-hectare patch of government-owned common land and began cultivating it with food crops.

Landless dalits in Gujarat and Bihar–states on opposite economic ends but where over 80% of dalit farmers work on others’ farms–face another problem: they were given titles under land reforms, but their land is in possession of higher castes.

Only half the dalit households in six Gujarat districts were found to have been in possession of the land they had been allotted, according to a 2015 survey. More than half of these households had to fight for at least five years to gain possession of the land. Long before dalit leader Jignesh Mewani shot to prominence after an incident in Una town, where seven dalit men were beaten for skinning a dead cow, he fought court cases to help dalits take possession of the land granted to them.

In 2014, Bihar–where almost 90% of dalit farmers are farm labourers–became the first state to recognise that lack of possession was a problem that needed state intervention. At the time, about 500,000 of the state’s 2.3 million dalits were yet to take possession of the land granted to them.

Jitan Ram Manjhi, the then chief minister of Bihar and the first dalit to hold the post, launched ‘Operation Dakhal Dehani’ or ‘giving possession’, under which camps were set up in villages and police and revenue officers helped dalits gain control of the land they had received titles to decades earlier. In 2018, when the operation ended, only about 40,000 families–or 25% of those eligible–were still without land and that was because of litigation, according to a Bihar government website.

The government plays a critical role in giving land to dalits because even if they can afford to buy land, they are discriminated against by sellers, said Sukhdeo Thorat, an economist and expert on caste discrimination. An unpublished field study by Thorat’s team, covering Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, found that dalits typically pay higher prices for land and are usually not sold “high-quality land”–near irrigation canals or next to fields of dominant-caste farmers. “The government has to give the ownership of public lands to the scheduled castes,” said Thorat.

An alternative to providing public land could be a programme like the one Telangana introduced in 2014. Under the Land Purchase Scheme, the Telangana government bypasses the difficulties of redistributing land to dalits by buying land from landowners and giving about three acres (1.2 hectares) to each landless dalit family. The state has so far purchased 6,070 hectares of land and distributed it to about 6,000 dalit families.

Under the Telangana programme, the families also receive irrigation and funds for fertiliser, pesticides and other things required for farming. However, dalit groups and human rights activists have criticised the scheme for slow progress, and some families have complained of poor quality land.

Return to landlessness
In Marathwada, the odds are stacking up against the dalits fighting to get the land they occupied regularised. In 2011, the Supreme Court ordered all state governments to ensure that encroachments on commons by individuals or by institutions were not regularised.

“Our ancestors were not fools,” the judgement by Justice Markandey Katju observed, referring to the ecological reasons–such as water harvesting–that led to the creation of commons in every village. Within weeks, the Maharashtra government issued a resolution stating that it would no longer regularise ‘encroachments’ on grazing land.

In 2016, the Maharashtra government launched an afforestation project by planting trees to bring one-third of the state’s area under tree cover. The plan calls for 500 million trees on government land statewide by 2020. Those trees are being planted on gairan in Marathwada.
In April 2017, as Sunanda Kamble and others reached the fields to harvest pigeon pea, they noticed that an earth mover had begun to dig trenches, one-metre wide and five-metre, long on their farms–to plant saplings. The farmers said they stood in front of the earth mover and threatened to throw stones and set the machine on fire if the operator did not stop.

“The women used such curse words that the operator, whom I know, told me he lost his appetite for several days,” one of the villagers said.

The dalits then took a bus to Osmanabad town and filed a complaint with the district collector. They did not hear back from the administration, but the earth movers did not return. When the villagers accessed land records, they found that in 2015 the district administration had transferred all the grazing land to the forest department, without any public notice or informing them.

Dalit families gather near a community centre in Gharegaon in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district. Dalits own no land in the village and work as labourers on the farms of upper-caste farmers. During the region’s recurring droughts, they migrate to western Maharashtra or to Mumbai in search of work.

A district forest officer, who did not wish to be named, said that although nearly 5,000 hectares of gairan had been transferred to the forest department, they had taken possession of only 900 hectares because the remaining land was occupied by dalit farmers.
“Our department is asking the collector to help us… maybe to give some alternative land to the occupants,” said the forest officer.

But a senior district officer said, also on condition of anonymity, that there was “no way” the collector could grant titles to the occupants or relocate them. “The land now belongs to forest department and it is all up to them now,” he said.

Granting gairan land to the Dalits was a “minimalist” demand considering that it is the least fertile land in villages, said Awanish Kumar, a Mumbai-based researcher who has recently completed a doctoral thesis on the gairan movement. “The land was abandoned by the villagers for being the least fertile, otherwise it would have been taken over by the dominant castes long ago.” The gairan movement is a struggle “to demand cultivation rights on land that is not even cultivable”, he said.

The dalits of Gharegaon abandoned their farms in 2017 after the forest department dug trenches. Rambhau Kamble said the farmers could not afford the risk of having their crop razed by the department. It costs about Rs 10,000 to cultivate an acre (0.4 hectare), and the farmers turn to moneylenders and savings from meagre farm-labour wages.

In 2017, Maharashtra’s forest department began digging pits in gairan (grazing) land to plant trees as a part of the government’s project to plant 500 million trees across the state.

As the 2019 monsoon approached, Kamble and the others wondered whether or not to sow, after a two-year gap. If they did not, the only jobs near the village were daily wage labour on large farms of higher castes. They wanted to hold on to the land, though they realise it is getting increasingly untenable.

“We want to cultivate this year, and it is quite likely that they [the government] will take action against us,” said Kamble. “But it is our right to have land of our own, so we won’t give up easily.”

(Gokhale is a writer with Land Conflict Watch, a network of researchers that collects data about ongoing land conflicts in India.)

First published on https://www.indiaspend.com/
 

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