Adivasis of Jharkhand — landless in their own land

"During the lockdown in 2020, some people came to set up a boundary around 1.20 acres of our land,” says Faguwa Oraon. An Adivasi farmer in his early thirties, Faguwa is pointing to a brick wall surrounding an open tract of land. We are in Dumari village of Khunti district, largely inhabited by the Oraon community. “They started measuring it saying, ‘this land belongs to someone else; it is not yours.’ We opposed them.

“About 15 days after this incident, we went to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate in Khunti, 30 kilometres away from our village. Each trip costs us more than 200 rupees. We had to seek a lawyer’s help there. Now that man has already taken 2,500 rupees from us. But nothing has happened.

“Before that, we had gone to the zonal office in our block. We even went to the police station to complain about this. We were receiving threats demanding that we give up our claim on the land. A district level office bearer of a far-right organisation threatened us. But there is no hearing that has taken place in the court. Now this wall stands on our land. Aur hum do saal se isi tarah daud-dhoop kar rahe hai [and we keep running around like this for the last two years].

“My grandfather Lusa Oraon had bought the land from landlord Balchand Sahu in 1930. We have been farming on the same land. We have the rent receipts issued from 1930 till 2015 for this plot. After that [in 2016] the online system was introduced. And there in the online records our plot of land appears in the name of the former landlord's descendants. We have no idea how this has happened.”

Faguwa Oraon has lost his land to the union government’s Digital India Land Records Modernization programme (DILRMP), a nationwide drive to digitise all land records and create a centrally managed database for them in the country. Under the programme aimed at modernising the management of all such records, the state government in January 2016 inaugurated a land bank portal listing district-wise information about land. Its aim was “to minimize the scope of land/property disputes and enhance transparency in the land records maintenance systems.”

It has done just the opposite for Faguwa and many others like him.

“We went to the Pragya Kendra to the find out the status of the land online.” The kendra is a one-stop shop for Common Service Centres in Jharkhand, created under the union government’s Digital India scheme that provides public services at the Gram Panchayat for a fee. “According to the online records there, Nagendra Singh is the present owner of the land. Prior to him Sanjay Singh was the owner. He sold the land to Bindu Devi who in turn sold it to Nagendra Singh.

“The descendants of the landlord kept buying and selling the same land two to three times without our knowledge, it seems. But how is this possible when we have offline receipts for the land from 1930 to 2015? We have spent more than 20,000 rupees as of now and are still running around. We had to sell the foodgrains in the house to raise the money. Now when I see the wall on the land, I feel as if we have lost what we own. We don't know who can help us in this struggle.”

Jharkhand has had a long and complex history of land rights. Policies and political parties have notoriously violated these rights in this mineral-rich area inhabited by a large Adivasi population. This state sits on 40 per cent of India’s mineral deposits.

According to the National Census 2011, the state has 29.76 per cent forest cover, spread over 23,721 square kilometres; 32 indigenous communities classified as Scheduled Tribes (STs) make up over a fourth, or about 26 per cent of the state’s population; 13 districts are fully covered and three are partially covered under the Fifth Schedule.

Adivasi communities in the state have been fighting from pre-Independence times for their resource rights, which are intricately linked to their traditional socio-cultural ways of living. Their collective struggles for more than 50 years led to the first formal record of rights, the hukuk-nama in 1833. This was the official recognition of the communitarian agrarian rights and local self-governance of the Adivasis a century before Indian independence.

And much before the constitutional reinstatement of Fifth Schedule areas, The Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (CNTA) of 1908 and the Santal Parganas Tenancy Act (SPTA) 1876, had recognised the right of the Adivasi (STs) and Moolvasi (SCs, BCs and others) landholders in those special zones.

Faguwa Oraon and his family have depended on the land their ancestors bought from a zamindar for their livelihood. In addition, they hold 1.50 acres of bhuinhari land that belongs to their Oraon ancestors.

The descendants of a family whose ancestors cleared the forests converting the land into paddy fields and establishing a settlement, collectively own such a land known as bhuinhari in Oraon areas and as mundari khuntkatti in Munda areas.

"We are three brothers,” says Faguwa. “All three of us have families. The elder brother and the middle brother both have three children each and I have two. The family members cultivate the farms and hilly land. We grow paddy, millet, and vegetables. We eat half of it and sell the other half when we need money. That is what we live on,” he adds.

Farming happens only once a year in this single-crop terrain. The rest of the time they have to look for wage labour in and around their village in Karra block, or even beyond, to survive.

The digitisation and its problems go beyond such family-owned lands.

About five kilometres away in Kosambi village, Bandhu Horo recounts the story of their collective land. "In June 2022,” he says, “some people came and tried to fence our land. They had come with a JCB machine (J.C. Bamford excavators), when all the people of the village came out and stopped them.”

"About 20-25 Adivasis from the village came and sat in the fields,” 76-year-old Flora Horo of the same village joins in. “People even started ploughing the fields. The party interested in buying the land called the police. But the villagers continued to sit till the evening. And later, surguja [niger herb or guizotia abyssinica] was sown in the fields,” he says.

“Kosambi village has 83 acres of land known as manjhihas,” 36-year-old gram pradhan Vikas Horo explains in detail. “It is the ‘privileged’ land in the village that was set apart by the Adivasi community as an acknowledgement of their landlord. The people of the village have been farming collectively on this land and giving a part of the crop to the landlord's family as a tribute, a salami.” The servitude did not end even when the zamindari system of land holding in the state was abolished. “Even today,” he says, “many Adivasis in the villages do not know their rights.”

Seteng Horo, a 35-year-old farmer whose family, like those of his three brothers, depend on their 10 acres of jointly-owned land for subsistence, has a similar story to tell. "Initially we didn’t know that with the end of the zamindari system, the manjhihas land goes back to the people who were cultivating these fields collectively. And since we did not know, we continued to give some grain to the descendants of the former zamindar after farming. It was only when they started selling such land in an illegal manner, that we organised ourselves and came out to save our holdings,” he says.

"The Bihar Land Reforms Act was implemented between 1950 and 1955,” explains senior advocate Rashmi Katyayan in Ranchi. “All the interest of the zamindars in the land – the right to lease out uncultivated land, right to collect rent and taxes, to settle new raiyats on wasteland, the right to collect taxes from village markets and village fairs etc. were then vested in the government, except for those lands that were being cultivated by ex-landlords themselves.

“The ex-zamindars were to file returns for such land as well as their ‘privileged’ land known as manjhihas. But they considered such land as theirs and never filed any returns on those. Not only that, but they also further continued to take half-share from the villagers long after the zamindari system was abolished. In the last five years, land conflicts have increased with digitisation,” says the 72-year-old Katyayan.

Discussing the rise in conflicts between the descendants of the ex-landlords and the tribes in Khunti district, advocate Anup Minj, 45, says, “The descendants of the landlords have neither the rent receipts, nor the possession of such lands, but they are identifying such lands online and selling them to someone or the other. Under the Occupancy Right section of the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act, 1908, the person who has been cultivating the land for more than 12 years automatically gets the right over the manjhihas land. Therefore, the Adivasis who do farming here have the right over this land.”

A United Parha Committee has been active in the last few years, organizing the people who farm these lands. This is done under the aegis of the traditional democratic Parha system of Adivasi self-governance. Parhas typically consist of groups of 12 to 22 villages.

“This struggle has been going on in many areas of Khunti district,” says Alfred Horo, a 45-year-old social worker with the committee. “The descendants of the landlord are trying to re-occupy 300 acres of land in Torpa block of the district, 23 acres in Tuyugutu (also known as Tiyu) village of Karra block, 40 in Pargaon, 83 in Kosambi village, 45 in Madhukama village, 23 in Mehan (also known as Meha) village, and 90 acres in Chhata village. So far, the United Parha Committee has saved close to 700 acres of Adivasi land,” he says.

The United Parha Committee is working to build awareness among the Adivasis about their land rights, showing them the khatiyan – a record of community and private land tenure rights based on the 1932 land survey. It gives detailed information about who has the right over which land, and the nature of the land. When the villagers see the khatiyan, they come to know that their ancestors owned the land they were farming collectively. It does not belong to the ex-landlords and the zamindari system has also ended.

“People can see all the information about the land online through Digital India and that is why the conflicts have gone up,” says Ipeel Horo of Merle village in Khunti. “On Labour Day, May 1, 2024, some people came to make a boundary around the manjhihas land near the village. They claimed that they had bought the land. Nearly 60 men and women of the village came together and stopped them.

“The descendants of the ex-landlords can see manjhihas land online. They still consider such lands as their ‘privileged’ possession and are selling them in an unfair manner. We are resisting their land grab with our combined strength,” adds Ipeel Horo. A total of 36 acres of land in this Munda village is manjhihas land, on which villagers have been doing collective farming for generations.

“The people of the village are not very educated,” 30-year-old Bharosi Horo says. “We do not know what rules are made and changed in this country. Educated people know a lot of things. But with that knowledge they rob the less informed people. They harass them. That is why the Adivasis resist.”

The much-celebrated ‘digital revolution’ has not reached many people living in areas with sporadic power supply and patchy internet connectivity. Jharkhand has seen only 32 per cent internet availability in rural areas. Add to this the digital divide in the country –exacerbated by the already existing divides of class, gender, caste and tribe.

The  National Sample Survey (NSS 75th Round - July 2017-June 2018) notes that in the Adivasi belt of Jharkhand, a mere 11.3 per cent have internet facility in their household and out of those only about 12 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women in rural areas know how to operate the internet. Villagers have to depend on Pragya Kendras for services, the inadequacies of which have already been discussed in a ten-district survey.

Vandana Bharti, Circle Office (CO) of Karra Development block of Khunti district sounds reticent as she speaks. "The descendants of the ex-landlords have the land papers but one has to see who has the possession on the land,” she says. “The tribes are in possession of the land, and they are the ones who have been cultivating it. Now that is a complicated matter. We usually direct such cases to the court. Sometimes the descendants of the ex-landlord and the people settle the matter themselves.”

A research paper in the Economic and Political Weekly on Jharkhand’s local residence policy published in 2023 says, “… each digital land record is turning revenue land into a private property regime, overlooking the traditional/Khatiyani system of recording community land tenure rights granted under the CNTA.”

The researchers acknowledge the incorrect entries for khata or plot number, the acreage, and changed names and tribes/castes of the owners of the land, along with fraudulent sale of the land that has left the villagers running from pillar to post to have the online records corrected and updated – but to no avail. And now that the land is under someone else’s name, they are not able to pay the relevant taxes.

“Who are the real beneficiaries of this mission?” asks Ramesh Sharma, national coordinator of the Ekta Parishad, a peoples' movement for land rights. “Is the land records digitalisation a democratic process? Undoubtedly, the state and a powerful few are the biggest beneficiaries, enjoying the gross outcomes of this mission, like the landlords, land mafias and middlemen once did.” He believes the inability of the local administration to understand and recognise the customary land practices demarcation is intentional. That they are consciously on the side of the undemocratic and powerful.

The fear among the Adivasi communities that 35-year-old Basanti Devi articulates, is more widespread than one can imagine. “This village is surrounded by manjhihas land on all sides,” she says. “It is a village of 45 families. People live peacefully. The village runs that way since we cooperate with each other. Now if the land on all sides is sold in an illegal manner, boundaries are made, then where will our cows, bulls, goats graze? The village will be completely blocked. We will be forced to migrate from here to another place. All this is scary.”

The author is immensely grateful for the insightful discussions and help that she has received from the senior advocate Rashmi Katyayan that have informed her writing.