Shirish Khare

Pallavi Kulkarni

Translator

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&quot;They said our life will change for the better, but
they have betrayed us,&quot; says Pritam Kunjam of Junwani village. ‘’After
taking our land, officials have given us back only a small portion on lease and
tried to make us believe that is all we own. Some of us have lost our homes,
farms and yards. But what we have truly lost is our grasslands, forests, public
land, cemeteries and
playgrounds. We have been going to the government offices to get our land back
for months.”
 
 
 The people of Junwani in Dhamtari district of
Chhattisgarh, 140 kilometres from Raipur, launched a struggle in December 2015 to get their land
back. They are fighting for their entitlements under the
Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act, or the Forest
Rights Act (FRA). The legislation, enacted in December 2006, came into force on
January 1, 2008.  The FRA provides for restitution of traditional forest rights to forest inhabitants across India. It
grants community rights to use minor forest produce and grazing lands, and
individual titles to land that Adivasis were farming as on December 13,
2005.
 
 While the Chhattisgarh
government claims to be ahead of other states in leasing lands under the FRA, data
presented at a workshop on forest rights held on November 15, 2015 in Raipur, where
both state and union government officials were present, points to a different
reality.
 
 The state government has dismissed
60 per cent of individual claims by Adivasis in the past seven years – or
around 512,000 such claims made under the FRA. And contrary to the law, which
stipulates 2.5 acres
 
 per adult
 
 , the Chhattisgarh government has
only recognised an average of 2 acres of forestland
 
 per family
 
 .
 
 When 44 per cent of the land in Chhattisgarh
is forested, not granting these rights to people who are entitled to them
becomes even more significant. Data presented at the same workshop showed that
Tripura and Kerala have dismissed only 34 per cent of similar individual claims.
 
 Junwani has 265 voters according to
its
 
 panchayat
 
 voters’ list – 662 acres are due to them as individual rights.  But local activist Benipuri Goswami says that
“decades-old records are being used and only 180 acres have been given on
individual leases.” Madhu Sarin, president of the executive committee of
Vasundhara, a Bhubaneswar-based research and policy group on environment and
sustainability issues, says, “Our law allows an adult 2.5 acres of land, but
they have given a smaller area, that too only in the name of the father.”  Women have not been given any land in
Junwani, Kunjam says. “Not a single woman&#39;s name has been registered.” And, he
says, no identification or map has been provided along with the leases.

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Chhattisgarh has also not declared
the number of community leases (these are different from individual titles) the state will grant. “Though there is a provision in the law, the government isn’t
giving land for community leasing,”   Benipuri says. Under community leasing, according
to the data presented at the same workshop in Raipur, Gujarat has distributed
280 acres of forestland on average per village, Karnataka&#39;s average is 260
acres, Maharashtra&#39;s is 247 acres and Telangana&#39;s is 676 acres. 
 Additionally, in January 2014, Chhattisgarh
announced its decision to turn 425 forest villages into revenue villages. This
was done ostensibly to bring them into the ‘mainstream’ and facilitate ‘development’,
but the people living there were not consulted during this process. And when
the revenue and forest departments both claim jurisdiction over the same land, the
Adivasis are doubly concerned their forest rights might get buried in this departmental
tussle. “A thousand acres of land belong to the village,” Kunjam says, “which
cannot be given to any department or private sector.’’
 
 However, Rajesh Sukumar Toppo,
director, department of scheduled castes and tribes, has emphasised that Chhattisgarh
is “ahead in the game when it comes to individual leasing but now preference
will be given to community leasing.” He says that on November 20, 2015, the
chief secretary directed the collectors to assist the community leasing process,
and that “such lands will also be included in the records.”
 
 The state’s minister of forests Mahesh Gagda said in an interview with this author, “The tribal community gets [forest]
land on lease much more easily than non-tribal people. As it is, the land is
distributed at the village level [based on recommendations made by the
 
 gram sabha
 
 ]
and not by the government. But many claims are being cancelled and these complaints
are being reviewed.”
 
 But Indu Netam of the Adivasi Samta
Manch, Raipur, says, “The government is playing the vote-bank game. Statistics
show that the leasing process was almost at a standstill for three years after
2009. However, at the time of the 2013 elections, 100,000 leasing procedures
were reportedly completed within a year. Now the process has slowed down
again.”
 
 Even as the Adivasis of Dhamtari
hammer on the state&#39;s doors to get the rights promised to them under the FRA, 186,000
acres of forest land in Chhattisgarh were diverted to industries between
2005-2010, according to the annual report of the mining department placed
before the state legislature. Of this diverted land, 97 per cent was
marked for mining.
 
 The Forest Survey of India records that
233,000 acres of forest areas in the state had already been given for mining between
1997 and 2007. The annual reports of the central and state mining departments indicate that
in 2014 alone, minerals worth Rs. 20,841 crores were extracted in Chhattisgarh.

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The government&#39;s priorities are
clear. Meanwhile, as Pritam Kunjam says, “If we lose our land, where do we
go?&quot;
 
 Photos: Shirish Khare and
 
 
 Deepak Gupta
 
 
 
 A version of this
 
 <a href="http://www.patrika.com/news/states/raipur-said-life-would-change-looted-the-village-land-1140198/">
 
 story
 
 </a>
 
 was published in the Raipur edition of
 
 Rajasthan Patrika
 
 on December 4, 2015.

‘If we lose our land, where do we go?’

'நிலத்தை இழந்துவிட்டு நாங்கள் எங்கு போவது?'

‘ನಮ್ಮ ಭೂಮಿಯನ್ನು ಕಳೆದುಕೊಂಡಲ್ಲಿ, ನಾವು ಹೋಗುವುದಾದರೂ ಎಲ್ಲಿಗೆ?’

'अगर हमर जमीन चले गे, त हमन जाबो कहाँ?'

‘ଯଦି ଆମେ ଆମର ଜମି ହରାଇବୁ ଆମେ କୁଆଡେ ଯିବୁ?’

’ہم اپنی زمین کھو دیں گے، تو کہاں جائیں گے؟‘

Junwani

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‘If we lose our land, where do we go?’

Chhattisgarh claims to be ahead of many other states in granting forest land titles to Adivasis. Why then are the people of Junwani still fighting for their forest rights?

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