Abstract
The collection of articles in the book is the outcome of a national seminar held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, in June 2014. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I, with six articles, deals with issues of land dependents. Part II has four articles and deals with the issue of revisiting land reforms from a social justice perspective. Part III, with three articles, deals with the issue of revisiting existing policies and laws. Part IV revisits people’s movements on the land question and Part V deals with issues and challenges of land governance. The contributors are academicians, researchers, bureaucrats and social activists. The articles cover four major concerns namely gender, caste, class and region. Although the book has been divided into apparently different segments, the broad findings in each segment tend to converge. The conclusion is primarily that the landless, largely scheduled castes and tribes, are by and large getting the wrong end of the stick and their plight is pitiable. Whether statistics are taken into account or whether ‘empathy’ is the guiding principle the conclusion is the same.
The volume shares what Daniel Thorner termed this condition as a ‘built-in depressor’. The distorted land ownership pattern, which is fortified by its imbrication with the country’s caste structure where the big landowners belong to the upper castes, the cultivators to the intermediate castes and the agricultural labourers to the lowest castes and tribes, and gender discrimination exists in most communities. Operation Barga launched successfully by the Left Front government of West Bengal in 1977 is illustrative of the kind of determinedness and political will needed to break the overlapping disabilities faced by the under-classes.
Another almost universal finding is that the state reiterates, if not perpetrates, the hapless plight of the landless. Its acts of commission include formulating discriminatory policies and laws relating to forests and environment and the various state land acts that work against this vulnerable section of the society. Its acts of omission include failure to implement laws, such as the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA) and the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act 1996, that could lead to amelioration of the plight of the under-classes.
The book highlights skewed pattern of ‘development’ adopted in the country post the liberalisation of the economy is resulting in a kind of ‘developmental terrorism’ while simultaneously creating a ‘corporate aristocracy’ and this approach has only worsened the situation. The myth of economic growth is sustained by the myth of technology and the term scientific technology has been used interchangeably by the state with ‘public good’. Most governments work on the principle of TINA (‘there is no alternative’) to this ‘scientific development’ model. The era of liberalisation and globalisation has seen a deepening of the peasants’ misery due to high input prices and low product prices, adverse labour and land markets, much greater dependence on informal credit, meagre public investment and productivity in agriculture, as also the entry of rapacious corporations into the farm sector. This has proved to be a breeding ground for Naxalite insurgency which now holds sway in the so-called Red Corridor running across Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Seemandhra.
Land reforms, particularly redistribution of land among the landless, has not come about on the desired scale and at the required pace. Despite six decades of planned development two thirds of the rural households are entirely or nearly landless, and the next 20 per cent hold less than 1 hectare. Landlessness has been steadily increasing among the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The structure of land ownership is so skewed that 60 per cent of the population controls only 5 per cent of the land, while 55 per cent of the land is controlled by 10 per cent of the population.
India has a history of revolts, uprisings and movements against this unequitous arrangement such as the revolt by Thane’s Warli tribe against landlordism during 1945–1947; the Tebhaga Movement (1946–1947) of sharecroppers in North Bengal; the Telangana Movement (1946–1951); Bhoodan Movement launched in 1951 by Vinoba Bhave; the December 1964 nation-wide satyagraha for land rights and minimum wages launched by Dadasaheb Gaikwad; the 1967 Naxalbari armed uprising of the tribal Santhal peasants and the more recent grassroots struggles in places like Nandigram, West Bengal (2007) and Raigad, Maharashtra (2011) which forced the state to bring forth a slew of ameliorative policies for the benefit of the subaltern strata. Despite various legal and policy measures, including the FRA (2006); the Draft National Land Reform Policy (Government of India, 2013); the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Settlement Act (2013); the National Crop Insurance Programme (Government of India, 2013a), and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Ordinance, the book reiterates that the crux lies in hoe these policies and laws are implemented.
The article titled ‘Land governance: issues, challenges and way forward’ reads like a lonely voice in the wilderness delineating the importance of modernising land records through the national Land Records Modernization Programme (NLRMP), rejected by Pradeep Nayak as yet another ‘techno-managerial’ programme of the government not likely to further the cause of land reforms.
A drawback in many articles is the out-dated data base used going back to the 1990s. Moreover, the articles do not consider the impact of more recent schemes such as MNREGA on rural landlessness, for instance, the construction sector has absorbed some of the surplus rural labour.
The universal panacea offered in the book is land redistribution and this is the only nostrum the state seems to studiously avoid. The political flutter created by the D. Bandhopadhyay Committee Report urging land reforms and the Report’s ultimate rejection by the Bihar government show that politically the country is still not ready to swallow the prescribed medication.