Dispossession of Peasants from Agricultural Land in Medinipur
A Need for Radical Changes in the Policy of the Government of West Bengal

Abhijit Guha

Deptartment of Political Science, Vidyasagar University, Medinipur, West Bengal
Paper presented at the conference Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction: Lessons From Eastern India, 25-27 September 2001

Contents

Land Reforms and Land Acquisition: The thesis and the anti-thesis?
The area
Consequences
The Aftermath of Land Acquisition In Kalaikunda: A Case of Policy Failure
A Policy Framework for Land Acquisition in West Bengal

Acknowledgements
References

 Fig. 1. The Structure of Policy

The policies adopted by any Government must always be subject to critical reviews not only from the political parties belonging to opposition but also from the various sectors of the civil society – NGOs, media, independent researchers and educational and research institutions.

In this paper, the land policy of the Left Front Government (hereafter LFG) in West Bengal has been taken up for a critical review. The reasons behind the selection of land policy of the LFG are as follows:

1. Land, particularly agricultural land, forms the backbone of the economy of West Bengal.

2. The peasantry of the state comprises the majority of the population and among them agricultural labourers, small and marginal farmers and sharecroppers numerically predominate.

3. The development policy of the LFG is centred around its land policy since it came to power in 1977.

4.Over the years, the policy emphasis of the LFG changed quite rapidly and as a result contradictory elements coexist within the land policy of the Government.

Land Reforms and Land Acquisition: The thesis and the anti-thesis?

In an agrarian state the policy around land is the most vital one for any kind of development planning. The perspective of the policymakers of the state power has many dimensions. In India, land reforms and land acquisition reflect the opposing policy perspectives of the Government. By land reforms the Government empowers the poor peasants while land acquisition disempowers the peasantry. Land reform operates through a decentralised and participatory mechanism while land acquisition is a centralised and bureaucratic procedure. Both exist within the same state machinery. Land acquisition causes displacement and under the existing legal framework, there is no provision for rehabilitation. Ironically, land acquisition is justified by the Governments on the grounds of development even when it negates the empowering effects of land reforms.

The Left Government in West Bengal which came to power in 1977 claims its uniqueness among the Indian states not only in staying at office for the last twenty two years through parliamentary democracy, but also for implementing a pro-people land reform programme with a fair amount of success, the key to which lies in involving the grassroot level people of the vast countryside in the execution of the Government policies related to development of agriculture in the state. Confiscation of the agricultural land of the big landlords beyond the limits provided by the Land Ceiling Act, distribution of land to landless labourers and recording of the rights of sharecroppers were the three major planks of the land reform policy of the LFG in which the communist parties of West Bengal involved a far greater number of rural poor than the previous Congress regime.

These socio-political developments raised the level of consciousness and expectation about economic development among the poorer sections (landless labourers, marginal farmers, rural artisans etc.) of the rural population in West Bengal. In Medinipur, (the largest district in the state) the bottom-up approach of the LFG crystallized into a politico-administrative movement which was phrased as “village based district planning process” during 1985-86, a few years before the adoption of the economic liberalisation policy of the central government led by Congress in 1991. The central objective of this decentralised planning process was to unleash a movement of village based rural development programme by the villagers and get a feedback primarily from the participants for further improvement. It would be relevant for in this study to observe how the district planning committee of Medinipur visualised the whole process of village based development programme. The said committee published a document entitled "Village based district planning process: an outline of methodology" in September 1985, which described in detail how relevant socio-economic information on each village could be collected by the grassroot level panchayat workers for using them in this micro-level planning process. Among many pro-people planning elements, the document gave importance to (i) identification of the nature and amount of agricultural land as well as their improvement through ecologically sustainable use and (ii) exploration of the possibilities of developing industries in terms of local demand, raw material and/or skill (District Planning Committee, 1985). But within a few years and particularly after the adoption of an export oriented economic liberalisation programme by the central government, the industrial policy of West Bengal also started to change quite cardinally. The Government which was fully committed to land reform started to invite capital intensive and technologically sophisticated heavy industries including multinational corporations. The ministers and the leaders of this government now justify this policy of inviting huge capitalistic investment on the ground that the economic capabilities of the rural population in West Bengal have increased through the successful land reform policy. But if one seriously looks into the latest report of a committee appointed by the government of West Bengal for the evaluation of its panchayat system, then the statement of the ministers which justified industrial investment do not seem to be realistic. The report, published in 1993, mentioned:

"land reform is not yet a completed program ... in the nearly eleven years till 30 September 1992, only 94 thousand acres were distributed. At this rate, the remaining 2.6 lakh acres will take almost 30 years to be distributed "(Mukarji and Bandyopadhyay, 1993).

It also stated:

“There is no sustained effort to help small and marginal farmers by converging rural development schemes on their households. Patta-holders are, more or less, left to fend for themselves, once land is allotted to them. So far this has been an area of neglect.”

The Area

Consequences

The first and foremost consequence conforms to the observation of Michael Cernea which he mentioned in his publications on the "eight major risks" involved in involuntary displacement caused by development projects all over the world (Cernea, 1996a; 1996b). Industrialisation in the liberalisation decade in Medinipur has undoubtedly led to dispossession of the small and marginal farmers from their principal means of production.

Table 1
Distribution of Households in Five Villages Affected by Land Acquisition

* Figures in parentheses of the tables represent percentage out of column total.

From table I it is found that the villages situated on the eastern side of the railway track (Ajabpur, Gokulpur, Liluakala and Mahespur) have been affected more in terms of the number of families who have lost their farmlands for the establishment of Tata Metaliks factory. The people of these villages are excellent farmers who keep themselves engaged throughout the year in agriculture. Besides paddy, they also grow almost all kinds of summer and winter vegetables like green chili, lady's finger, mustard, water-gourd, pumpkin, bitter-gourd, brinzal, potato, cabbage, cauliflower, radish and others.

These vegetables are grown in lands adjoining the homesteads which have not yet been acquired by the Government. The villagers mainly sell these vegetables in the local markets which fetch them some cash income. On the other hand, the families who live in the village Amba, lying on the western side of the railway track belong to the Kora tribe who are suffering from the trauma of dispossession, as all the tribal families within our sample have become landless through this process of industrialisation in an agricultural milieu. Many of the Kora women and men now work as temporary unskilled labourers in the coke oven industry.

Table 3
Post-Acquisition Landholding Pattern of Households in the Study Area

In the pre-acquisition stage, there were no landless families in our sample households and 75 per cent of these families belonged to the size category of 0.5-4.5 acres. According to the latest standards set by the Government of West Bengal, these families should be regarded as marginal and small farmers. The pattern of landholding among the same families after land acquisition show that 15 per cent of the families have become landless and the households belonging to the lowest landholding category (< 0.5 acres) have increased from 19 to 35. On the other hand, the number of households within the size category 3.5-7.5 acres, have declined from 22 to 9 only. The tables 2 and 3 also show that in the post acquisition phase the affected families have been supporting a higher family size with lesser amount of land.

Table 4
Land Acquisition Scenario Among the Sharecroppers in the Study Area

In table 4, we have shown the distribution of sharecroppers according to the size category of their land-holdings. It is true that the number of sharecropper families constitutes only 7.63 per cent of the total number of affected families but the overall importance of this phenomenon has to be assessed in the light of the land reform policy of the LFG in West Bengal. Not only the political leaders of this Government but also the academic researchers have praised the communist Government for increasing the bargaining capacity of the share-croppers through the recording of their rights over agricultural land. (Lieten, 1996). But here also the case of industrialisation in Medinipur under the wider context of the structural adjustment programme and economic liberalisation policy shows that even a communist government which was committed to uphold the interests of sharecroppers could also dispossess small and marginal farmers along with share-croppers from their means of production in this era of globalisation.

Table 5
Profile of Utilisation of Compensation Money by the Landloser Households in the Study Area

In table 5 we have made an attempt to quantify the pattern of utilisation of the compensation money received by the landlosers in the study area. First, it should be mentioned that all the 144 households have received monetary compensation, although many landlosers during the field investigation reported that they are yet to get the full compensation money. Second, all the families have utilised the compensation money in more ways than one. We have found eight categories of utilisation of the compensation money by the villagers and ten categories of compensation. But as the household members have spent the money under more than one utilisation category so any row total is a result of the addition of the same household more than once under different categories. As a result, sum of all the row totals is not equal to the total number of households in our sample. Each column total however represents the actual number of households out of 144 under any particular utilisation category. This gives a fair idea as to how the villagers have tried to compensate their loss of land. The maximum number of affected households have spent some portion of the compensation money in domestic consumption, while the second highest number of households have deposited a part of the money in bank. But if spending for marriage of the family members and house-building/repair are also considered to be domestic consumption then clearly the latter item predominates in the compensation utilisation process. The lower frequency of households who have tried to spend the money for agricultural purposes (for example, purchase of arable land or shallow tubewells) marks the beginning of the process of displacement of these small and marginal farmers from their traditional occupation and peasant way of life.

Other consequences are various; first, the dispossession of the peasant agriculturists from their major means of production should not be equated with the current market price of the agricultural land which is regarded as the yardstick by the administrators for paying cash compensation to the land losers. The colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (marginally amended in 1984), still in force, has no provision for looking into the multidimensional socio-cultural problems of agricultural land. For example, this law does not recognise the different forms of communal usufructuary rights of people over land, forests and water bodies. In Kharagpur region, the land which has been acquired for the industries by the application of this Act used to serve as good communal grazing fields in the post-harvest rainy seasons; the poor villagers also used to collect varieties of small fishes from the standing water in the paddy fields. All these were age-old, customary and communal rights, now usurped after the industries have encroached on agricultural lands.

Second, this act does not also look into the interests of the landless agricultural labourers whose chances of getting employment in agricultural work is reduced when owner cultivators lose arable land through acquisition.

Third, various rural artisan groups like blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, etc. who serve the peasant households in various ways also face a reduction in the demand of their products and services when peasant households are suddenly deprived of their major means of production.

The Aftermath of Land Acquisition In Kalaikunda: A Case of Policy Failure

In this section we would briefly describe the case of land acquisition for another pig-iron plant in this area which has not yet been established. This case shows the utter neglect of the CPI (M) led Left Front Government about the interests of the poor farmers of the Kharagpur region. Apart from fieldwork the data for this section have been collected from the Land Acquisition Department of the District Collectorate of Medinipur during 1999-2000.

The Century Textiles and Industries Ltd. got possession over 234.86 acres of land on 22.05.96 and another 119.39 acres in the next phase by 11.04.97. So at the initial phase the company got possession over 354.25 acres of land within 18 months from the date of the first notification of the acquisition in the newspapers in the month of October 1995. Immediately after this possession the company started to put up a barbed wire fencing around this huge chunk of land and cultivation of paddy was stopped since the monsoon of 1996. Meanwhile, the government and the company proceeded with the process of the payment of compensation and the land acquisition department of Medinipur district calculated that a sum of about Rs. 8 crores had to be deposited by the company. Accordingly, the company had also started to deposit the money and the payment of compensation to the landlosers continued throughout 1996: But during this period the construction work of the company did not progress at all and even the barbed wire fencing also collapsed and the whole chunk of land was converted into a grazing field. The documents of the land acquisition department reveal the situation in its own way. In one of the departmental files we found a petition of one Smt. Mallika De (dated 11.09.98) of Mallancha village wherein she stated that she has not yet received any compensation although her land was acquired by the government of West Bengal for CTIL. The order sheet of the department in its notes from 12.10.98 to 15.03.99 revealed that the case is a genuine one but as the requiring body (i.e. CTIL) has not placed any fund since December 1996 payment could not be made to this case. Many other cases like this are still pending with the District Land Acquisition Department. The concerned department is also not in a position to return the land to the farmers who have not received any compensation as no specific order has yet come from the higher authorities of the state government. The various statements made by the concerned ministers of the Left Front Government in this connection in the media only reveal the proverbial gap between words and deeds of the political personalities. For example, in a news item published in The Statesman dated 14.06.96 it is learnt that a high-power cabinet sub-committee has been formed to coordinate the different proposals for the establishment of industries in the state. In this connection, Mr. Budhadev Bhattacharya, Deputy Chief Minister of West Bengal categorically stated: “land would not be given indiscriminately to the multi-national corporations and the big industrial houses for setting up of their units” (The Statesman, 14.06.96). In another press statement Mr. Suriya Kanta Mishra, Minister for Land and Land Reforms (who is also a member of the aforesaid high-power sub-committee) announced in the Writers’ Buildings on 27 February 1997: “Land leased out by the state government to industrial companies and which remain unutilised will be reclaimed for allotment to new industrial entrepreneurs”. The Minister further added that “a special committee has been set up by the state government to identify land where industries can be set up without impinging on agricultural land” (The Statesman, 28.02.97). About a year after this announcement by the Land and Land reforms Minister, the Gram Panchayat Pradhan elected from the CPI (M) Kalaikunda Anchal invited all the affected landowners and sharecroppers of the ten mouzas whose lands were acquired in April 1996 to discuss over the matter. The meeting was held on 21.06.98 and more than 200 landlosers attended it. Suffice it to say that till that time no construction work on the land leased out to CTIL had been made. The meeting unanimously authorised the local CPI (M) leaders to take the matter to the higher level of the administration but nothing happened after that and many peasants expressed their resentment and/or frustration whenever we enquired about the role of the CPI (M) dominated panchayat of the region regarding the acquisition of their agricultural land. On 19.4.99 the Land Acquisition officer of the Medinipur district wrote to The Managing Director of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (memo No 592/LA) seeking advice about the future course of action in connection with the land acquired for Century Textiles and Industries Ltd. It is learnt from the letter that payment of nearly 4 crores have been made to the affected persons but the company has not placed any fund after that and many farmers are facing a lot of hardship owing to the non-payment of compensation. No reply from the higher levels of administration has been sent to the District Collector till the first week of December 1999. On 7 December 1999 the Joint Secretary to the Ministry of Land and Land Reforms of the Govt. of West Bengal wrote to the Collector of Medinipur district to “send a report on the Land Acquisition case for construction of sponge and Pig-Iron Project of M/s. Century Textile Industries Ltd. quickly for the information of the Minister-in-charge” (letter No. 2703-LA (II) dtd. 12.11.99). Since then no report has yet been sent regarding this “urgent matter” as by that time more “urgent issues” have engulfed the Land Reforms Department of Medinipur district. It would be interesting to mention here about a newsitem published in The Statesman on 18.11.99. The said news item published the interviews of the staff correspondent of Medinipur with Mr. B.K. Birla, the Managing Director of CTIL and Mr. Surya Kanto Mishra, the State Land and Land Reforms Minister respectively. The company Managing Director told the reporter that they will not proceed with the project as the national market of pig iron has become very much competitive because of the entry of China and Australia in the field”. When the reporter asked the Minister of Land and Land Reforms who had won the elections from Medinipur, about the fate of several hundreds of farmers affected by this acquisition the Minister said: "We are not finding any taker for the land". (The Statesman 18 November 1999). This is the latest position of the acquisition of more than 500 acres of fertile agricultural land in the Kalaikunda area where neither industries have come up nor the farmers have been allowed to cultivate their land for four consecutive agricultural seasons. The farmers of the area told the reporter of The Statesman that at least 20,000 quintals of rice could have been produced from this huge chunk of land which still remains unutilised. In the following table we summarise the chronological succession of events of land acquisition for the Century Textiles and Industries Ltd (CTIL).

A Policy Framework for Land Acquisition in West Bengal

In this section, a discussion has been made on the changes that may be incorporated in the land acquisition process of the Govt. of West Bengal. In this connection, it should be mentioned that the following points have emerged out of the foregoing case study of land acquisition in Medinipur district. Some of the suggestions have also been made by researchers working in the field of displacement in other parts of India. The West Bengal situation, however has its unique features. For example, the disempowering effects of land acquisition on land reforms deserve special attention of the policymakers in West Bengal. The relationship between Panchayats and land acquisition is another area which bears special significance for the development policy of West Bengal. The policy recommendations are now in order.

1. Any generalised macro-level hypothesis regarding economic development should take into consideration the micro-level realities of the field of its application. That land reform prepares the ground for industrialisation may be true in some specific situations but industrialisation without a down to earth policy of rehabilitation through the generation of employment and skill development could be a self-defeating endeavour. The case of industrialisation in the Kalaikunda area has clearly demonstrated this self-defeating process.

2. The West Bengal Government should have a clear-cut policy regarding the acquisition of fertile agricultural land for the establishment of industries. The Government should explore all the possibilities of the establishment of industries on non-agricultural land and mention this with reasons in the Gazette notification, if acquisition of agricultural land becomes unavoidable. The Gazette notifications for land acquisition must mention the type of land (agricultural, non-agricultural wasteland, orchard, pond, etc.) acquired for a particular project. And the state Government should publish a book from the Land and Land Reforms Department every year which would give the statistics on the type of land acquired by the Government in each district for development projects. This would enable the Government to evaluate its policy towards development.

3. Every case of land acquisition should be preceded by a socio-economic survey of the would be affected people in collaboration with the local gram panchayat before the preparation of the preliminary enquiry report by the Land Acquisition Department. This survey should be specifically aimed to make a socio-economic impact assessment (SEIA) of the concerned development project (Ramanathan and Geetha 1999). The socio-economic impact assessment survey should first be cleared by the gram panchayat(s) and then forwarded to the District Land Acquisition Department for its placement in the screening committee. And this procedure should be made mandatory and incorporated in the LA Act by making necessary amendments in the State Legislative Assembly. The gram panchayat and the panchayat samity should be legally empowered to reject any proposal for land acquisition within their jurisdiction by showing sufficient reasons. This amendment would also be well in line with the 73^rd Amendment of the Indian constitution which empowered the panchayats to the level of a self Government at the local level.

4. There should be a provision in the West Bengal Panchayat Act which would make it mandatory for the elected panchayats to give priority to PAP’s within its area at the time of implementation of various poverty alleviation schemes by the panchayat. Here the project affected scheduled tribe and scheduled caste families should be given priority among all the DP’s.

5. Specific amendments in the LA Act should immediately be made with regard to cases of land acquisition where the acquired land has remained unutilised by the RB for more than two years. The rights of the owners of this type of land should be re-established without taking back the money which they had received as compensation. As they have failed to utilise the land, there is no point in paying back the money deposited by the RB (out of which compensation payment is made) in all these cases.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted for this work do my students Tapan Raghu and Laxman, my colleagues Falguni, Ambarish, Gopal and Rajatda, staffs and the land acquisition department of the Medinipur district and the villagers of Kharagpur area who were affected by the acquisition. I also express my sincerest thanks to Alan Rew, Shagad Khan and Basar for inviting me to present this paper in the international seminar on Social Development Research Capacity held during 25-27 September 2001 in Bhubaneswar, Orissa. I am also grateful to the concerned authorities of the Vidyasagar University who have allowed me to present the paper.

References Cited

Cernea, M. (1996)a
Eight Main Risks: Impoverishment and Social Justice in Resettlement, The World Bank Environment Department.

Cernea, M. (1996)b
Impoverishment Risks and Livelihood Reconstruction: A Model for Resettling Displaced Populations, The World Bank, Environment Department.

District Planning Committee (1985)
Village based District Planning Process: An Outline of Methodology, District Planning Committee, Midnapore, West Bengal.

Lieten, G.K. (1996)
Development, Devolution and Democracy, New Delhi: Sage Publication.

Mukharji, N. and Bandyopadhyay D. (1993)
New Horizon’s for West Bengal’s Panchayats, Department of Panchayats, Govt. of West Bengal.

The Statesman (1997)
"State to reclaim unused land leased to industries", 28 February 1997 p.4.

The Statesman (1999)
"Kalaikunda land unused", 18 November 1994, p.4

Ramanathan, R. and S. Geetha (1999)
“Land for Industrial Purposes”. Seminar Vol. 474. Pp 52 – 54.