Understanding Causes for Land Loss in the Nilgiris

Land Regimes and the Plight of an Agrarian Region: Understanding Causes for Land Loss in the Nilgiris

M.S. Selvaraj1 This is a time of heated debates over the future of Indian agriculture, with the current government's efforts to amend the 2013 version of the Land Acquisition Act to be placed before Parliament again shortly, and with both the opposition and the government claiming to best represent the interests of Indian farmers. But rural distress continues to deepen, and the political salience of this issue has not translated into serious policy action by most State governments or by the Centre. This study was done in order to examine the phenomenon of land loss in a particular region of India - the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. But over the course of a year's field work in the area, it became clear that land loss is intimately linked to the agrarian crisis, and not merely as just another consequence of unstable agricultural prices. Rather, it demonstrates the fact that the causes of the agrarian crisis extend beyond only the question of public investment and government schemes. It also forced us, and we hope our readers, to question certain basic assumptions underlying the present consensus in the debate around agriculture. Two assumptions in particular were undermined by what we found in the Nilgiris. The first assumption is that the agrarian crisis is primarily rooted in prices and underinvestment - that is, around the viability of farmers' individual private landholdings. The debate around the Land Acquisition Act has also been framed as driven by the need to protect individual landowners from loss of their private lands. But, as we found in this study, the viability of agriculture is closely linked to not just farmers' private property rights (or, in addition, what might be called their "trade rights") but to the landscape within which they cultivate - and in particular to the common spaces and resources that they rely upon. The fact that common property resources are important has been increasingly acknowledged in academic and international policy circles, but much of this discussion has not focused on the link between common lands and individual agriculture. Further, even these discussions have not penetrated into public and political debates in India at all, which continue to revolve around the idea that agriculture is entirely an individual activity of commodity production. The second assumption is that state management - or more accurately, management by government officials - is the most effective, and indeed the only effective, form of management for land. This assumption is more implicit - and obviously more strongly found in the statements of those who support the government's current approach to land and agriculture - but it remains a common position in Indian policy circles. Despite numerous regulations and statutes that, to varying degrees, recognise forms of control over land that lie somewhere in between private property and completely bureaucratic forms of management (see Gopalakrishnan (2012) for some examples), both policy makers and the administrative system largely ignore the existence of these regulations. We found that this blind spot both reflects and exacerbates the problems that

1 The author is a member of the Social Research Collective, https://srcindia.wordpress.com. Shankar Gopalakrishnan assisted in the writing up of the study.

1 agriculturists face. The Nilgiris offer a particularly fertile ground for such considerations. The mountain range falls within a social, economic, geographical and political context that makes it the microcosm of several of the tendencies and problems that are currently the subject of national debates. Some of these include:

 Price fluctuations and market volatility: Tea cultivation, both by large estates and small holders, forms the mainstay of a large section of the population of the Nilgiris. The ongoing crisis in the tea sector in India is well known (see Das (2014) and Ghosh (2014) for some details). In this sense the Nilgiris replicates many of the features of the ongoing agrarian crisis that are highlighted in "mainstream" debate.

 Control over forests and forest land: The Forest Survey of India reports that over 81% of the district is covered in forests, though this is clearly a significant overestimate, considering that FSI data includes tea estates and plantations within its definition of "forest cover" (FSI (2012)). The issues around forest areas - a significant problem in large parts of India, especially the central and Northeastern regions - are clearly visible in the Nilgiris. This includes questions of wildlife management and forest regulations, both of which are critical to many of the problems being faced by agriculturists in the Nilgiris.

 Land acquisition and development projects: A number of conflicts around land acquisition have occurred in the Nilgiris in the recent past, including one related to an elephant corridor that will be described in detail below. The district has also been the site of development projects such as dams, road construction and the planned Indian Neutrino Observatory (now shifted), along with ensuing conflicts around land acquisition and takeover.

 Land mafias: The elephant in the room of much of the debate around land acquisition has been the presence and operation of land mafias in large parts of the country. The Nilgiris, as we shall see, offer a particularly well documented and clear example of how such mafias work.

 Adivasi (tribal) rights: The Nilgiris is also the home of several adivasi communities, who today comprise approximately 8% of the population (as per the 2011 Census). As discussed in the next section the adivasis were the original inhabitants of these mountains, and the process of land loss and dispossession that has affected them both parallels the process in other parts of India and, simultaneously, demonstrates how closely these processes are linked to the problems affecting other agriculturists.

 Capitalist agriculture and corporate farming: In the form of the tea estates, the Nilgiris also offers a clear illustration of the dynamics of large scale corporate and capitalist agriculture - precisely the kind of "advanced" agriculture that successive Indian governments have implicitly promoted as the long-term "answer" to India's rural and agrarian crisis. There has been relatively less discussion of the manner in which such agriculture affects land relations, which, once again, is starkly clear in the case of the Nilgiris.

2 Methodology Below, we discuss the findings of our study in four regions of the Nilgiris - Gudalur and Bandalur talukas; Kotagiri; Coonoor; and Udhagamandalam (Ooty). The study relied on a combination of several techniques for our findings. These included the following. First, we held extensive personal and family discussions with a total of 60 families in the five talukas of the Nilgiris district. All of these families are either small cultivators or landless farm workers who had previously owned land. Of these families, nineteen were adivasi families, twenty were small farmers (mostly Dalits or Tamil repatriates), and eleven were women-headed households. We then cross-checked on the historical and economic statements made by these families against secondary data available from government records, prior studies and other available information. Discussions with government officials in the Forest and Revenue Departments were also held on these issues. Finally, the study included a series of discussions with organisations working on land and land rights issues in the Nilgiris.

The Adivasis: Land Loss and the First Residents The original and first inhabitants of the Nilgiris were adivasis, tribals belonging to a number of communities (of which six continue to reside in the mountain range today). Over time, they have been systematically and at times violently dispossessed of their lands in the mountains, reduced, as we saw above, to a small minority and to the poorest of the inhabitants of the mountain range. A full discussion of their dispossession is outside the scope of this study (see Cederlof (2010) and Bandhu (2011) for more details). Here, we concentrate on the key patterns that led to their dispossession, which, as discussed below, have significant links to processes affecting both adivasis and other cultivators in the present day. In our discussions and in the organisational work around mobilising them, the adivasis stressed that their dispossession flowed from two sources. The first was their lack of a sense of private property ownership over land. To them, land was a homeland, a territory, and a site for cultivation and hunting / gathering, but certainly not a form of property. In discussions adivasi elders repeated that the only proof they had of their use of land was temples, cremation grounds, ancient rock paintings, and other evidence that the administration simply ignored (and continues to ignore, notwithstanding the legal provisions discussed below in the section on forest management). The result is that most adivasis, then and now, lack written records establishing their rights over land. Only those of two communities - the Todavas (Todas) and the Kotas - were able to obtain titles to some lands through struggle. This is nothing unusual - similar patterns of dispossession have played out across the rest of India as well (see Daimari (2011) and Patel (2011) for histories of similar processes in Assam and Gujarat respectively, along with other works in that series). Exploiting this lack of records, state agencies, and particularly the Forest Department, have engaged in repeated expropriation of adivasi lands. Several incidents are well known among the adivasis of the Nilgiris. They reported that more than 40,000 acres of grazing land were taken over by the Department. Conflicts continue even today. In Glenmark, an area in Ooty taluka, five Todava villages - Tuvalkodu, Taranadu, Sengamakadu, Arthal, and Mankodu - were cultivating land and utilising common areas for grazing. For decades, they have been engaged in a struggle

3 with the Forest Department for 1600 acres of these lands, which the Forest Department has now classified as forest. Forest officials have even seized land to which Todava cultivators had titles. Similarly, in Kozhakamba, in Coonoor taluka, adivasi cultivators described how forest officials had suddenly arrived at their settlement in 2014. They demolished homes and uprooted crops over an area of 25 acres of land, claiming that the settlement was an "encroachment" on forest land. Similar incidents occurred in Chinna Kozhakamba and Anaplam, both areas of Coonoor, in each of which 20 acres of land was seized by the Department. By their very nature, there is little documentary evidence of the claims of adivasis in these disputes. But the records do clearly demonstrate that the Forest Department did not carry out its legal obligations under the Indian Forest Act and orders issued under it - and, more importantly, that they continue to violate the Forest Rights Act of 2006, a point discussed further below. The second threat is the takeover of their land through simple illegal grabbing - both in historical periods and at present. For instance, the entire area encompassed by the talukas of Gudalur and Bandalur was once an adivasi territory, ruled by two adivasi chieftains. In the early nineteenth century, according to local histories, the Nilambur Kovilagam - a landlord family from neighboring Kerala - killed one adivasi ruler and compelled the other to hand over her lands (see next section). Such conflicts continue. During our study, an example of this process emerged in Muthur Colony, also in Ooty taluka, in which over 120 acres of land owned by Todava farmers has been taken over by neighboring large landowners. Tea estates are particularly egregious offenders in this regard; this point is discussed in more detail in the section on estates below. The adivasi communities in the Nilgiris continue to struggle for their rights both to private land and to the forest. But the manner in which their lands were stolen has shaped the entire history of the mountains - and continues to reverberate to this day.

Land Control, Land Expropriation and Land Mafias Perhaps the best example of this reverberation is the intimate linkage between expropriation of adivasi land, subsequent land management and the problems being faced by agriculturists today is in Gudalur and Bandalur talukas of the Nilgiris. As discussed above, this adivasi territory was originally taken over by the Nilambur Kovilagam of Kerala.2 The Kovilagam was subsequently recognised as a zamindar by the British administration, and 80,087 acres of land in the area were assigned to it under the Malabar Tenancy Act. Nine large tea estates subsequently leased 52,000.71 acres of this land from the Kovilagam, though, as per a 1974 survey by the government, only 19,644 acres of this was actually used for tea cultivation. The remaining area was either forested or cultivated by tenants of the Kovilagam. Adivasis continued to reside in and utilise much of this land, without any legal title. The tea estates, meanwhile, brought indentured labourers from Dalit and other oppressed communities to the hills. Around the time of independence, a further wave of migrants entered the hills as part of the government's Grow More Food campaign. Many of these people settled in or near the Kovilagam's lands and continued to use this area for cultivation, forest produce, and

2 The narrative in this part of the study relies on facts told to us by residents of Gudalur, on facts familiar to the authors as a result of their work in the area, and on the details provided in People’s Union for Civil Liberties (2002).

4 so on. In 1969, following the trend in the rest of the country, Tamil Nadu passed the Janmam Lands (Abolition and Conversion to Ryotwari) Act to expropriate the Kovilagam, abolish their zamindari and grant titles to the actual cultivators of the land. The Act provided for the grant of titles to the jenmis (members of the Kovilagam family) for lands they were directly cultivating (section 8) as well as to direct tenants of the jenmis (section 9). In addition, however, the Act also provided a separate section for the lands leased to the tea estates; the State government was empowered to extend or terminate these leases under section 17. Finally, the Act provided that land under forest could be classified as "government forest" (section 53). Survey and classification of the land was to be done by the Assistant Settlement Officer. Superficially, there was nothing unusual about this law, which followed the pattern of such laws in other States. The problem arose, however, with respect to three factors - section 17, section 53, and a series of court orders. According to the survey and settlement by the ASO, a little over half of the total land - 41,768.40 acres - were plantation leaseholdings and hence covered under this section (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2002). However, a large proportion of this land, as noted above, was not actually part of any tea estate. Meanwhile, 12,928 acres was classified as forest under section 53 - but the Janmam Act was not clear as to which provisions of the Indian Forest Act would apply to this area. Finally, the nine tea estates challenged the constitutionality of the Janmam Act in the High Court, and then on appeal in the Supreme Court. For decades (1974 to 1999) their case remained pending. As is routine in such cases, the Supreme Court issued a status quo stay order in the first hearings, but said that this order did not bar applications for titles under section 9. All of this created a situation of considerable uncertainty. This uncertainty was then compounded, in the late 1970s, but the arrival of a large number of Tamil repatriates in the area from Sri Lanka. These people, whose origins lay in the indentured labourers forcibly taken to Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century by British tea planters, were forcibly repatriated to India in this period as a result of the rise of Sinhala chauvinisma nd the signing of the Sirimavo-Shastri pact between the two countries (UTHR 1993). Though the Government of India was obligated by the pact to rehabilitate these workers, the majority of them never received the land they were promised (see Gopalakrishnan (2010) for more details). As a result, they began to settle on lands classified under section 17 and 53, often on the basis of false promises from local land brokers that their sale deeds were valid property titles. As a result of this in-migration, the number of people in the area with ambiguous title increased further. All of this created a ripe environment for a land mafia to operate, and, unsurprisingly, this is what took place. In the late 1990s, a small number of "land grabbers" began taking over very large areas of land in Gudalur and Bandalur. The process - documented in detail in a People's Union for Civil Liberties' fact finding report (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2002) - consisted of occupying a large area of land and then filing an application for a title to it under section 9 of the Janmam Act (as if the occupier were in fact a tenant of the original zamindars). Since there were already several thousand applications from genuine cultivators pending, and the constitutional status of the Janmam Act was in any case under challenge, these applications would not be decided. Subsequently, a local court would be approached with a plea to grant an injunction that the applicant's possession should not be disturbed until the application was

5 decided. This would then be granted - effectively shielding the land grabber from eviction. Since the natural forest in these areas included teak and other valuable trees, the land grabber effectively became immensely wealthy both from the land itself and from the forest on it. In one particular incident, nine such land grabbers went further, and managed to bribe the Assistant Settlement Officer to actually grant them titles in 1998 - for land that, the PUCL claimed, was not even cultivated (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2002). The Janmam Tribunal in Ooty stayed the grant of titles, but once again issued a status quo order - effectively legalising the land grabbing. This situation continued until February 25, 2009, when the Janmam Tribunal finally struck down the ASO's order; the titleholders approached the Madras High Court, which upheld the Tribunal's order.3 The impact of such land grabbing on other agriculturists in the area was deep and widespread. First, many of them were attacked or themselves lost land to the land grabbers. Taking advantage of their power in the area, the land grabbers were able to also take over others' land, and those who resisted were beaten or otherwise threatened (we could not confirm reports of killings). Such incidents were narrated several times by our interlocutors, and were also documented in the PUCL report (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2002). Secondly, the pressure on state agencies to act against the resulting forest destruction, combined with the pressure of the land grabbers themselves, resulted in repeated eviction drives targeting adivasi, Dalit, and Sri Lankan smallholders rather than the actual land mafia. The PUCL report documents how a rare forest officer who did in fact attempt to tackle the mafia was shortly transferred (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2002). Constant harassment and the threat of eviction severely affected small cultivators in the area. Thirdly, the presence of the land mafia meant that the state machinery made no effort to complete a survey and settlement of the section 17 lands, or to grant titles to those who were cultivating these lands (in some cases for over three decades at this point). Repeated electoral promises made by every party are simply ignored once in power, for any effort is met with fears of "law and order problems." In practice the land grabbing was eventually halted by the resistance of the smallholders of the area, who resisted further efforts to take over forest land or their own holdings, and demanded that officials conniving with the land grabbers be removed. Over several years, repeated rallies and exposure of officials conniving with land grabbers eventually resulted in the prevention of more land takeovers in the area. By around 2003 - 2004, this form of land grabbing stopped. We have gone into some detail on the process adopted by land mafias in the Gudalur area as this is a rare area where, due to a long history of local organising, the activities of such mafias have been both studied and documented in detail. There is nothing unique about this situation, notwithstanding its historical peculiarities. Similar situations exist in other parts of Tamil Nadu and in the rest of the country. At times these are the result of failure to settle rights after expropriation of zamindar lands - as is the case in the former Ayakudi zamindar area in Kodaikanal, also in Tamil Nadu, or the Jagatsinghpur area of Orissa.4 In other areas, such mafias operate in areas with different histories. The Nilgiris case, however, illustrates three features that are fairly common across such areas. 3 Koya Moideen vs. The District Forest Officer, Nilgiris (STA 2/2009), dtd. May 28, 2015. 4 The majority report of the POSCO Enquiry Committee documents this situation in some detail. It is available at https://www.elaw.org/system/files/POSCO%20India%20Majority%20Report%2018%20Oct%202010.pdf

6 The first is the close interaction between land mafias, local administration, and the judiciary. This is not merely a question of corruption. The roots of the problem lie in the combination of a legal- administrative system entirely focused on recorded individual land rights - which, in many parts of the country, are embedded in a much larger matrix of forms of land use - with administrators and judges who are entirely unaccountable. This privileges those who can use the local administration system to alter records, or to ignore records, in their favour. The second is the impact such mafia activities have on other agriculturists. They directly threaten the activities of small cultivators, seek to seize their lands, and destroy the forests and grazing lands that they depend on for livestock rearing, water and forest produce. Those entirely without recorded lands - such as the adivasis of Gudalur - suffer particularly severe consequences. The third is the indirect impact such mafias have on land rights, which extends far beyond the direct violence they engage in. Mafia activity creates an environment where the authorities simultaneously attempt to protect the mafia while appearing to be "acting" in order to curb land encroachment. Once again, this is not unique to the Nilgiris. As this is being written, a similar debate is playing out in Orissa, where a recent policy measure titled the Orissa Prevention of Land Grab Act is being opposed by Dalit organisations, adivasi organisations and other groups who argue that its primary victims will be the poor and the landless (Jena 2015). The presence of land mafias thus becomes a pretext for draconian action against smallholders without secure tenure - even while the actual land mafias are rarely targeted. Such perverse policy action is particularly common in forest areas, an issue that we turn to next.

Forests and Forest Land Linked closely to the land mafias and land rights issue - and, once again, rooted in the manner in which the adivasis of the Nilgiris were originally dispossessed - is the question of control over forests and forest lands. This issue is not usually considered in the context of agriculture and its impact on land loss. If it is engaged with, it is usually considered to primarily be a question concerning tribals. However, forests constitute 23% of the country's land area. A recent study estimated that more than a quarter of the villages of the country are entitled to rights over community forest resources under the Forest Rights Act (RRI, Vasundhara, and NRMC 2015). The experience of the Nilgiris - regarding the impact that control over forest land has on agriculturists - hence raises another vital issue regarding the state of agriculture in the country today.

Control Over Forest Land The Nilgiris lie at the intersection of several territories that are important both for purely ecological reasons and for administrative ones. The hills are the main catchment area for several major rivers in the surrounding States - Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka - and are also among the most biodiverse regions of the world. In administrative terms, the area was the site of one of the first protected areas ever declared in the country - the area now known as the Mudumalai national park - and falls between several sanctuaries and national parks, including Bandipur National Park in Karnataka, Wayanad Sanctuary in Kerala, and Mudumalai. Al of these factors combine to make the Forest Department a particularly powerful agency in the

7 Nilgiris. From the colonial period, the Department's purpose - originally, the maximisation of timber yields for colonial authorities - required and resulted in an autocratic structure focused on policing land use (Sarin 2005; Gopalakrishnan 2012). This, in turn, has had manifold implications for local residents in and around the areas under Department control.

Direct Loss of Land - Critical Tiger Habitats and Elephant Corridors The first form of such a threat is the direct takeover of land by the Forest Department. Two examples are prominent in the recent history of the Nilgiris. The first concerns Mudumalai National Park, which was converted into a tiger reserve in 2007. Under the Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act of 2006, tiger reserves were given a statutory status for the first time. The new law provided for the reserve to consist of two parts - a "critical tiger habitat" or "core area", and a "buffer zone". The law also provided that the declaration of a critical tiger habitat had to be done in consultation with local communities and with the consent of the Scheduled Tribes and other forest dwellers in the area.5 The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, also provided for recognition of the forest rights of forest dwellers and provided a set of safeguards to ensure that their consent was taken prior to any relocation from "critical wildlife habitats." In December 2007, however, a number of tiger habitats across the country were notified without complying with this process (Bijoy 2011). One of these was Mudumalai. The entire national park was notified as a critical tiger habitat in this month, without complying with either the requirement for scientifically demonstrating the need for this status or the requirement of local consultation. Once the critical tiger habitat was notified, however, there was now a need to declare a buffer zone around it - and the zone proposed for this purpose covered a large area of Gudalur, on the one side, and the Masinagudi area of Ooty taluka on the other. The Collector sought to have the panchayat presidents sign off on this declaration - apparently in order to claim to have undertaken "consultation", though such superficial consultation would not have met the requirements fo the law. However, Suneetha, the panchayat president of Masinagudi, refused to sign the declaration without a clear statement of the legal implications. When she approached some of the local organisations working on these issues, she was told of the law and the manner in which the forest authorities were attempting to bypass it. Though declaration of a buffer zone did not necessarily imply that all private lands would be taken, the Department strongly implied that it would seek to "control" use and to take as much land as possible. In response, local organisations of cultivators began to organise protest letters and statements, opposing the buffer zone strongly. This culminated in an all party rally on December 31st, 2008, in which an estimated one lakh (one hundred thousand) people participated, and which was supported by all the major political parties of the area. Following the rally, the buffer zone declaration was effectively put in suspended animation, and no further action has been taken on it since.6 However, for a large part of the same area - Masinagudi - the respite was brief. In 2008, a

5 Sections 38V(4) and 38V(5) of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, as amended in 2006. 6 These details were familiar to the authors and also narrated by local organisational activists in the area. Some points can also be found at http://www.forestrightsact.com/statements-and-news/48-struggle-against-forest- bureaucracy-in-tiger-reserves-massive-demonstration-in-tamil-nadu.

8 petition was filed in the Madras High Court seeking to have a large part of the area declared to be an elephant corridor and "encroachers" removed.7 This term - "encroachers" - is a catch-all term that encompasses anyone who could be accused of illegally occupying government land without a title, even if, as was the case in this area (see next section), the occupier may in fact be entitled to the land in question. The Forest Department supported the petition, saying it was taking steps to acquire private lands in the area. When they came to be aware of it, adivasi and non-adivasi cultivators in the area also filed applications in the High Court demanding that their rights be settled under the Forest Rights Act. This resulted in some initial protection, in the form of a court order that their rights should not be disturbed, but the question of identifying those eligible for rights was left ambiguous. Moreover, this was little protection for those who were not covered by the Act, and the Forest Department informed the court that only those in reserved forests - a small proportion of the land - would be included. Subsequently, the uncertainty was compounded as the area proposed to be included in the corridor changed continuously. For instance, according to a list of dates appended to a subsequent Supreme Court petition filed by residents of the area (see below), in affidavits filed in 2008, the Forest Department stated that only 583 hectares of private lands would be acquired, with no reference to other lands. On September 5th, 2009 the District Collector (with the support of the Forest Department) then said the corridor would include 6,160.35 hectares of revenue land; then, ten days later, the same official stated that only 1,185 hectares would be required; then, in November 2009, an expert committee consisting entirely of forest officials submitted a new map; when this map was made public on January 7th, 2010, the area included differed by another 1,100 hectares from all the earlier maps and proposals; and finally, in August 2010, when a notification was issued by the government declaring the corridor, the list of areas covered differed from all previous proposals.8 In addition to this constantly changing position, the High Court also changed the scope of the matter by expanding the scope of the petition. First, a series of orders were passed banning electric fencing in the area, which some farmers (and resort owners) had built for protection from wild animals. Then, in its final judgment9, the Court reversed all its own earlier orders (which had provided some protection under the Forest Rights Act to some persons) and directed that all land in the elephant corridor should be acquired and all those using it should be removed. There is no procedure in law that permit such a blanket acquisition without any due process, and the judgment is arguably unconstitutional. Appeals against the judgment are now pending in the Supreme Court, which has stayed evictions for the present. All of these circumstances - critical tiger habitats, elephant corridors, and the arcana of forest law - may appear unique to Masinagudi or the Nilgiris. But this impression would be misleading. Fundamentally similar conflicts exist around forest areas across the country, which, as discussed above, therefore affect almost a quarter of villages across the country.

7 In Defence of Environment and Animals vs. Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Ors., WP 10098/2008 in the High Court of Madras. 8 Drawn from list of dates prepared by lawyers handling Supreme Court appeal by Mudumalai Pazhanguidyanar Nala Sangam against Madras High Court judgment in In Defence of Environment and Animals vs. Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Ors. 9 Dated April 7th, 2011.

9 The effect of such processes on small landholders and cultivators can be imagined. In our discussions, in the area, family after family stated that they intended to leave at the first opportunity - usually after abandoning their farms or selling their land cheaply. They reported that land sharks were moving in the area, seeking to buy out distressed farmers. For seven years, those in Masinagudi, and to a lesser extent in large parts of Gudalur, have lived in constant fear of imminent removal from their lands and with constant arbitrary changes in regulations. The removal of fencing, whether ecologically justified or not, also increased risks for cultivators in an area with many large wild animals. Finally, in a pattern discussed further below, the elephant corridor also began to see constant interference by the forest authorities in provision of basic facilities. This is not required by either the High Court order or any applicable law.

Indirect "Choking" of Livelihoods A second aspect of forest management that impinges on surrounding areas is the use of forest regulations in a manner that threatens the ability of people to continue living in these areas. This was an aspect that was brought up in every area of the Nilgiris that we studied. Gudalur, once again, offers a particularly illustrative example. Official documents in this regard were handed over to the researchers by local activists and officials, as well as One area of Gudalur is known as O'Valley, a short form of "Oucher Loney Valley" (named after a colonial administrator). As a result of the confusion over land settlement in leased areas following the Janmam Act, all of O'Valley has been assigned a single survey number in the revenue records - despite having 24 separate settlements and approximately 32,000 people living within it (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2002). This survey number, in turn, was notified in 1991 as a "private forest" under the Tamil Nadu Protection of Private Forests Act (the TNPPF Act). This, as discussed below, would itself cause problems later. However, in the case of Gudalur, these problems were made particularly severe by a 1996 Supreme Court order10 that stated that any land recorded as forest in any government record, or that fit the "dictionary definition" of forest, should be considered to be forest within the terms of the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980. This seemingly technical distinction is crucial on the ground, since the Forest (Conservation) Act requires Central government permission prior to any "non-forest" activity in a "forest area." This combination of circumstances suddenly made the Forest Department the most powerful regulatory authority O'Valley, and indeed in most of the Nilgiris. The TNPPF Act was intended to regulate sale and transfer of "private" forest land, but not to ban all construction and development activity; but the combination of the Supreme Court order and the TNPPF notification effectively meant that any activity other than plantations in the area became illegal. On January 30th, 2006, the District Collector of the Nilgiris directed that all "development activities" in O'Valley should be immediately halted.11 The Collector's letter was apparently prompted by a letter from the District Forest Officer threatening the Collector with contempt of court if the order was implemented. A red board was also put up at the entrance of O'Valley stating that no further 'development activities' would be allowed "in accordance with the orders of the Supreme Court of India" (this board was removed some years later after protests). All

10 Order dated 12.12.1996 in T.N. Godavarman Thirumalpad and Ors. vs. Union of India and Ors., WP 202/95. 11 Letter No. Rc.A5 No. 2992/2006 dated 30.01.2006 from Collector, Nilgiris District.

10 repairs to roads, public buildings (including schools, anganwadis and health centers) and provision of electricity connections were stopped. Following repeated protests and demonstrations in the area, these restrictions were relaxed in practice, but the Forest Department continued to use the orders to arbitrarily harass residents and extort money from them. Moreover, the Department engaged in a continuous creeping expansion of its powers. First, despite the fact that the 1996 order could at most be held to apply to the areas notified under the TNPPF Act, the 2006 letter of the Collector cited above extended them to all lands classified as "section 17" lands under the Janmam Act. Further, the Department continued to use these provisions repeatedly to tighten restrictions in the area. For instance, in September 2013, the DFO wrote to the Tea Board of the Nilgiris directing them to immediately halt providing any subsidies to tea cultivators in O'Valley "and other section 17 lands" as this would be "violative of the governing Acts as well as the orders of the Hon'ble Supreme Court".12 This resulted in the Tea Board stopping subsidies; today they are provided only where people are able to protest loudly enough. Similar letters were sent by various authorities, at the prompting of the Forest Department, in 200913 and 201414 and 2014 threatening action for violations of the TNPPF Act. This was not unique to Gudalur. In the proposed elephant corridor area discussed above, the Forest Department has similarly imposed a ban on basic development facilities - including repairs to buildings, water pipes and electricity connections , prompting some adivasis to approach the High Court. No judgment has been delivered on their petition, and as with O'Valley and the tea subsidies, the situation remains intensely conflicted - only those who are able to fight or bribe their way to get services are able to receive them. Similar problems were reported by our interlocutors in Kotagiri and Ooty talukas.

Mismanagement of Forests and Ecosystems Finally, in practically all the areas studied, a common theme that emerged was human-wildlife conflict. Interlocutors in Gudalur, Kotagiri and Ooty all reported a rapid increase in human- wildlife conflict in the last 15 years. In Gudalur, for instance, two to three deaths reportedly occur every month a result of attacks by elephants. Normally, increases in such conflict are attributed to human presence in wildlife rich areas, or, more specifically, on encroachment into forest areas by people. Yet, when this thesis was brought up, it was repeatedly pointed out in all these areas that there has been no sharp increase in cultivated area or in encroachment in most parts of the Nilgiris in the last fifteen years. The only exception may be some of the areas with land mafia activity, but there is no correlation between these areas and the increase in human-wildlife conflict. Agriculturists living on forest fringes in Gudalur and Kotagiri argued that the real cause is not "encroachment" or "population growth" but interference in forest ecosystems by the Forest Department. The planting of teak and eucalyptus trees, as well as well as checks on forest fires

12 Tamil Nadu Forest Department letter reference number 6838/2013 O dated 20.09.2013 from the District Forest Officer, Nilgiris, to the Asst Director of Tea Development, Tea Board, Coonoor. 13 Letter No. A4/52857/08 dated 21.09.2009 from the District Collector to the Registrar. 14 Letter No. 1536/2012 dated 03.12.2014 of the Tamil Nadu Forest Department.

11 and cattle grazing, had created an opening for exotic plants - such as Parthenium - to grow within protected areas like Mudumalai. These plants had rapidly colonised the forest floor and grown up into a kind of choking undergrowth (which is clearly visible in these forest areas when traveling through them). As these plants are inedible for elephants, deer and other wildlife, their presence - and the failure of the Department to remove them - deprives these animals of food and forces them to enter nearby cultivated areas in search of edible plants. This, in turn, naturally triggers conflict. Such claims appear entirely plausible, given the visible absence of all other undergrowth in these areas. Moreover, this would not be a unique case. A similar situation that has received considerable scholarly attention is Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, Rajasthan. Here, the forest authorities' ban on cattle grazing in the park resulted in aquatic grasses choking the watercourses in the park and reducing the available habitat for the thousands of migratory birds that nested in them (Lewis 2003). The imposition of uniform bans on preexisting processes in forest areas can thus have a perverse impact on wildlife.

Forest Rights and Forest Governance As a result of all of the above, residents of these areas come to feel that their continued existence is being rendered unviable by the state. The result is abandonment of lands and migration. It may appear that this is merely the result of bureaucratic insensitivity and inertia, and that merely a more "sensitive" implementation of laws would be sufficient to reduce the impact on local livelihoods. Yet such an approach ignores the proactive, systematic manner in which the Forest Department repeatedly exceeds its powers and seeks to expand both the area of land and the regulatory domains under its control. Perhaps the best evidence of this fact is the gross violation of certain laws by these same authorities - in particular the Forest Rights Act of 2006, which has not been implemented in the district at all.15 All of this indicates that the problem is systemic in character, and related fundamentally to the land regime operating in the area. We return to this point in the Conclusion.

Tea Cultivation and Tea Estates Tea cultivation is a mainstay of agricultural livelihoods in the Nilgiris. The Indian Tea Association reports that 66,175 hectares of land in the hills is under tea cultivation, which - if correct - would mean that 85% of the cultivated land in the district is used for this crop.16 But tea cultivation brings its own twin problems to agiriculturists in the district.

Smallholders and Tea Prices The vast majority of tea cultivators in the district are smallholders - according to the 2010 - 2011 Agricultural Census, 94% of operational individual holdings in the district are below two

15 In V. Sambasivam vs. Union of India and Ors., the Madras High Court had imposed a bar on grant of forest rights titles without the permission of the court in 2008, but had simultaneously directed the State government to ensure implementation of the law and identification of rights holders up to the point of grant of title. 16 ITA data drawn from http://www.indiatea.org/tea_growing_regions.php, last accessed on June 19, 2015; and total area of cultivated land taken from Government of Tamil Nadu (2009).

12 hectares in size17 Tea has certain advantages for such cultivation - it provides yields year round, is relatively hardy, and, until the last decade, provide a reasonable return (Gopalakrishnan 2010; Government of Tamil Nadu 2009). However, following the removal of quantitative restrictions on tea imports, the purchase price of tea leaves has begun to fluctuate wildly. While the price of "made tea" - as sold in retail - has continued to steadily rise, the price paid to producers has experienced an overall decline, to the point where it is falling below production costs. As early as 2000 this was reported to be resulting in massive distress in the Nilgiris (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2000). During our fieldwork for this paper, practically all cultivating families reported this as a serious problem. The constant insecurity and volatility have resulted in families migrating out of tea cultivating areas - in Gudalur, for instance, all spoke of a large scale migration to the industrial areas near Tirupur. These claims are corroborated by figures from the Nilgiris Small Tea Growers Association, which claims that the number of smallholder families cultivating tea fell from 65,000 to 43,000 between 2004 and 2014 (Thiagarajan 2014). To analysts of Indian agriculture, this is the familiar problem of price volatility that has plagued Indian agriculture in the post liberalisation period. But even here the problem is not limited to prices alone. In 2005, the Tamil Nadu government initiated a subsidy scheme for small tea cultivators - those with less than 25 acres of land - in the district. The researchers have copies of the orders of the government on this subsidy scheme. Immediately, a problem arose: as discussed above, a very large number of cultivators did not have complete legal title to the land for which they were seeking subsidy, especially, but not only, in Gudalur. Local cultivators' organisations succeeded, through various protests, in ensuring that the subsidy scheme would be provided regardless of formal title, and instead made subject only to field verification of actual cultivation by government officials. Despite this, when claims were initially filed by some of the families we met, they were rejected by the Collector on the grounds that they did not have titles to their land and that the land was notified as forest. 315 cultivators challenged these rejections in the Madras High Court, on the grounds that the rejection was not in accordance with the policy; the court directed the government to consider their claims within the terms of the policy.18 Approximately 14,000 families subsequently benefited from the tea subsidies, which were however discontinued in 2006. When they were reinitiated by the Tea Board, the Forest Department, as discussed in the previous section, once again raised objections regarding "violations of Supreme Court orders." In this sense, the tea pricing problem is intimately connected to the question of land tenure in the hills. This connection becomes more apparent if one examines the other form of tea cultivation: large tea estates.

Tea Estates and Control Over Land Tea estates have been a feature of the Nilgiris for over 150 years, and continue to be so today. According to the 2010-11 Agricultural Census, 140 institutional holdings (0.2% of the total number of holdings) cover 40% of the total cultivated area in the district. This ratio is even higher for some areas; Bandalur taluka has three holdings that together cover more than half of

17 This applies to all crops, but as said the majority of cultivators grow tea on part or all of their plots. 18 See for instance the judgment in M. Abdullah and Ors. vs. District Collector and Anr., WP 32441/2006.

13 the cultivated area in the taluka. The crisis in tea estates, and the impacts that this crisis has had on estate workers and on the viability of the tea industry, are out of the scope of our study and have been discussed in detail elsewhere (see for instance Mishra, Upadhyay, and Sarma (2012), Ghosh (2014) and Selvaraj (2014)). However, prior to the present crisis, the tea estates played a different role with respect to agriculturists and land relations in the district. Given the size of the estates and their wealth, it is not surprising that tea estate owners are among the most powerful people in the Nilgiris. According to many of our interlocutors, this position was often abused by the estates to engage in their own land grabbing in the hills. Adivasis in Ooty, Kotagiri and Gudalur alleged that tea estates had driven them out of their lands, in some cases with violence. Available documentary evidence - which is naturally scarce - appears to corroborate such statements. In Gudalur, the 2002 PUCL report states that agricultural tax assessments showed that "Manjushree Plantations increased its cultivated area by 1,304.77 acres between 1977 and 1997, and Tea Estates India increased its cultivated area by 2353.80 acres between 1977 and 1997 (i.e. an expansion of 250%)" - notwithstanding a Supreme Court status quo order. The same report narrates a case of an adivasi family being forcibly evicted from their homes by a neighboring tea estate. This land grabbing bears many similarities to the mafia land grabbing discussed earlier, and had similar direct and indirect consequences for small landowners. They faced the same threat of losing their own lands as well as of attack by authorities seeking to appear to be acting against "encroachments", while ignoring the land grabbing by the big estates (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2002). This process appears to have slowed as the tea estates themselves have descended into crisis. Indeed, ironically, some tea estate owners are now fleeing their properties in order to avoid paying their workers (Selvaraj 2014). But such land grabbing points at a deeper problem, which we return to in the next section.

Conclusion In this study, we have tried to convey how fieldwork in different parts of the Nilgiris, combined with earlier experiences and the viewpoints of many organisations working in the district, considerably problematises the conventional discourse around land loss and Indian agriculture. In particular, we have focused on interlocking aspects of the land regime that operates in this district. Notwithstanding some specificities, this regime is not unique to the Nilgiris. Rather, it reflects certain institutional and political realities of rural India. The first of these is the importance of common resources such as forests and forest lands - and the management regime that applies to them - to agriculturists and rural residents. The second is the linkage between the attempts to autocratically seize such lands - whether by the state, land mafias, or tea estates - and the resulting direct and indirect threats that this results in for other agriculturists in the area. Through this we have sought to highlight a relatively unexplored aspect of the agrarian crisis -

14 the lack of a democratic, accountable and collective mode of regulation over land management. As a result, agencies driven by expropriation are able to seize more land and to extend their control over lands beyond those under their occupation. Meanwhile, the lands they do succeed in seizing are mismanaged, and sometimes abandoned, which in turn produces more negative effects for those seeking to earn a livelihood in the area. All in all, it is not surprising that at least of the families we spoke to were interested in migrating. Fear and despair stalked their lives in the Nilgiris, and they saw no future in a district where, to them, agriculture had been rendered unviable. This feeling reflects fundamental features of the agrarian crisis currently affecting India. Until there is a democratic and accountable system of controlling land use as a whole, this facet of the crisis is likely to continue.

15 REFERENCES

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