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Success stories by Venkitesh Ramakrishnan

Sustained struggle has enabled tribal and Dalit communities in certain pockets to regain their land rights.

COUNTLESS studies conducted over the last three decades by government bodies and land rights organisations underscore that tribal communities have been the worst sufferers of land acquisition in the name of development or industry. Estimates say that 40 per cent of the land acquired for developmental projects and activities since Independence has been from tribal communities in different parts of the country.

In this long history of alienation of land, a few instances of positive assertion of tribal land rights have also come up, particularly in the last decade. These are indeed inspiring stories of sustained struggle at the level of civil society and the judiciary, coupled with conscientious intervention from sections of the bureaucracy.

The cases in point include a number of villages in Karahal tehsil of Sheopur district in Madhya Pradesh and several villages in Uttar Pradesh in districts such as Sonebhadra, Lakhimpur Kheri, Gonda and Mirzapur. Organisations such as Ekta Parishad and the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers have played an important role in scripting these success stories.

Travelling to Panwada village in Sheopur district, Frontline witnessed the first signs of success as 52 persons belonging to the primitive Sahariya tribal community showed orders from the district administration authenticating their rights over 185 bighas of land (one bigha is approximately half an acre, or 0.2 hectare). Their land had been encroached upon and forcibly occupied by a number of outsiders from places as far as Haryana, Punjab and Delhi. Every one of the occupiers was a non-tribal and claimed property rights over the area stating that they and their ancestors had been living in the village for decades. Some of them also forged documents in an effort to support this claim.

But, obviously, these documents had no validity because Panwada was totally a tribal village, inhabited only by tribal communities until the late 1980s. The authorities had placed the village under the Panchayats (Extensions to the Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996, legislated specifically to restore alienated land and control of local resources to tribal communities. Still, the outsiders held on to the land for more than five years and even cultivated the land.

Ekta Parishad activists took up the case of these tribal people in different fora, including the judiciary, and with the district administration and the revenue authorities. They helped the tribal people to file petitions in court and before the revenue authorities. Peaceful forms of agitation such as dharnas were carried out before the district administration.

After a sustained struggle that lasted for five years, the district administration ordered the eviction of the outsiders and the re-entry of the tribal owners into their respective properties. The order was issued on May 11, ten days before Frontline visited the village. The villagers are now eagerly awaiting the authorities to initiate demarcation proceedings and the formal handing over of the land to the rightful owners.

Ekta Parishad also struck a vital blow for tribal land rights at Lahroni, a village in Karahal tehsil of Sheopur district. Here, all the 94 alienated tribal people and Dalits have been handed over their 130 hectares of land. They had got patta for the land in 2003 but were not allowed to take physical possession of the plots by those who had illegally occupied them.

Six others were the beneficiaries of the Bhoodan land and had entitlement papers dating to the early 1990s. Here too, non-tribal people, mostly from outside Madhya Pradesh, encroached on the land. The villagers initially sought the help of the village authorities to get possession of their land, but to no avail. It was in this context that Ekta Parishad activists initiated a struggle through courts and civil society action. At the end of eight years of struggle, the tribal people were able to re-occupy their land.

Ran Singh Parmar and Donger Sharma, leaders of Ekta Parishad, said that similar struggles were on in several other villages of Sheopur district and in other places in Madhya Pradesh. “Many of these struggles have not produced any result. And some have produced a half victory, which has not restored the rights of the tribal community,” Ran Singh told Frontline.

According to him, in Panwada itself there are 31 other tribal people whose land was encroached upon by outsiders. “The district administration has upheld that the land was encroached by outsiders but has gone ahead and termed it as government land. This is nothing short of encroachment, albeit by the government,” Ran Singh said. Ekta Parishad activists are persisting with the struggle on these fronts.

Frontline came across similar cases in Sheopuri near Panwada and Bagwaj, close to the district headquarters of Sheopur, where tribal people complained about the government taking over their land. According to Donger Sharma, 12 tribal families were denied justice in Sheopuri, while 45 families met a similar fate in Bagwaj. Sharma pointed out that the Bagwaj land was targeted by the land mafia on the one side and by sections of the government on the other because it bordered the district headquarters town of Sheopur.

“The reasons are obvious. This land is turning into a goldmine for everyone. The government has even gone to the extent of building a hostel on the tribal land. It has also put up a board claiming that the land belongs to it, while the tribal people have documents dating back to the 1960s and 1970s to show their rights over the area,” Sharma told Frontline.

In Surma and Golbojhi villages of Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh, it was the Forest Rights Act (FRA) that helped the local Tharu tribal community obtain land rights for the first time after Independence. Approximately 200 tribal families benefited from the intervention of the Tharu Adivasi Mahila Mazdoor Kisan Manch in association with the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers. The civil society intervention was followed up by a section of the bureaucracy which found merit in the claim of the Tharu tribal community. Nearly 700 acres of forest land was ready for patta distribution in the first week of May. According to Roma, a member of the Forest Rights Monitoring Committee of the Uttar Pradesh government and a leader of the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers, similar patta distribution initiatives were advanced in the eastern Uttar Pradesh districts of Sonebhadra and Mirzapur in the past couple of years. The government's claim is that as many as 12,000 pattas have been distributed in Sonebhadra alone.

However, according to Brijlal Bharati, a Sonebhadra-based activist of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), many of these pattas remain only on paper. Bharati told Frontline that the CPI(M) has time and again sought to highlight these discrepancies before the district authorities, with varying results. “What is required is sustained action from political parties and public activists along with a positive response from the government and the bureaucracy,” he said.

Ran Singh Parmar said that while the larger plight of the tribal people, Dalits and other deprived communities vis-a-vis land rights presented a dismal picture, the initiatives in a few interior villages of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh pointed towards a possible path for their empowerment and the ensuring of their land rights.