Understanding Causes for Land Loss in the Nilgiris
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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.