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Survey tiptoe on land minefield by Sankarshan Thakur

Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s ambitious new effort on land survey and consolidation could become another perilous flirtation with the hornet’s nest.

Days after its unveiling at the presentation of the first annual report card of Nitish’s second term, a top minister in his cabinet sounded both alarm and caution on the land survey proposal. “Land, as the chief minister himself knows, is an extremely sensitive and volatile issue,” he told The Telegraph. “We must tread with extreme care and ensure people have no misgivings or misapprehensions before embarking on the job. My guess is what the chief minister wants will be very tough to fulfil.”

During his first term in office, Nitish had test floated a land-to-the-tiller balloon but had to hurriedly shoot it down because of shrill opposition from landed and powerful status quoist interests, a substantial part of them within his ruling NDA. Nitish was hard put to explain that he was not attempting any radical re-distribution of land, merely seeking to identify and certify bataidars (sharecroppers), so they could benefit from the government’s welfare schemes. But that did not put down the anti-bataidari clamour and the government had to eventually abandon the effort.

Top government officials are allaying fears that the survey would entail any unsettling of current holdings. “It is only a survey,” one said. “It will be an elaborate exercise but it will be socially and politically benign, the intention is not to create any upheaval in society, we want an updated and reliable database. Nobody should feel threatened.”

The land survey and consolidation idea comes recommended by sound sense. The state’s 94,000-odd square kilometres, mostly rural land, have not been surveyed in close to a century and records not updated. What record-keeping exists is in poor repair or lost to the ravages of time. Part of the exercise will be to use satellites to obtain precise imagery, then match it with current holding and computerise the records.

Consolidation, which is meant to follow the revision and modernisation of land records, may be an equally pressing need. Fragmentation of holding is so acute it has made agricultural production stagnant if not also retarded it.

But sensible and necessary though it sounds, the job is easier said than done. “It will convince few that this exercise is only about updating records,” another minister in the Nitish government said. “People, especially landed people, who also happen to be socially and politically influential, will receive any new initiative on land as a hostile move, they do not want it touched.”

He referred back to the hastily shunned bataidari move and said: “That was nowhere intended for any re-distribution of land but so virulent and wild was the campaign that the government was going to grab land from the landed and award it to the landless that we had to bury the move before it was born.”

He feared that a comprehensive survey could unleash similar opposition. “Many people are in excessive or benami possession of land, a lot of government land lies illegally encroached or occupied. Any survey will reveal that, there may be upheaval tough for the government to contain.”

Successive regimes in Bihar have promised varying degrees of land reform but none has delivered owing essentially to the clout of the landed lobby in all influential sectors, most of all in politics. Former chief minister Lalu Prasad, who himself came from among the subalterns and publicly vowed to run an egalitarian broom over land, was never able to summon enough radical courage.

Early in his first term in power, he even told the Bihar Assembly that he had had a list of close to two hundred benami landlords prepared and would enact laws to strip them of illegal possessions. His promised bill never came, although Lalu helmed Bihar for a decade and a half thereafter.

“Power and politics are so structured in most of north India that it is almost impossible for governments to turn radical on land issues,” says a Patna-based sociologist who would not agree to be named for fear of inviting the government’s displeasure. “I am quite sure Nitish Kumar has the right intentions, society will not become egalitarian until most of the land is held by a few. But can he resort to such radicalism? Is it sustainable in power politics? The answer, bluntly, is no.”

Land consolidation — or “chakbandi” — could prove an equally nettled task. It will require, in most cases, for multiple landholding parties to agree on exchange or transfer of smaller plots of land in order that individual acreages can become large enough for sustainable cropping. That itself is liable to create rifts and suspicions about the government’s intentions. “Especially so because of the background of the bataidari move in Nitish Kumar’s case,” said the sociologist. “However hard he may want to wish it away, the bataidari ghost continues to haunt him.”

The Congress had initiated a “chakbandi” move in the mid-1980s and set up a commission for the purpose but the move ran into so many tangles — social, political and legal — that the commission had to be disbanded and the entire idea forgotten as a nightmare they did not wish to be revisited by. Nitish has dared that nightmare again in the name of need-of-the-hour necessity. Only he believes, he can make a future dream of it.