Govt V Govt V People

Two government departments and landless people are locked in a legal battle over 4,000 ha in Madhya Pradesh whose outcome would have countrywide ramifications

- Jitendra

ON AUGUST 3, Shashank Mishra, District Magistrate of Betul in Madhya Pradesh, will hear a land ownership case. It involves over 4,000 hectares (ha) of mostly community land in 11 villages of Ghoradongari tehsil. The remarkable feature of the case is that while both forest and land revenue departments are claiming ownership over the land, in 2008, when farmers and tribals living on the land demanded land titles under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 or fra, both the departments rejected the applications, saying the other was the owner. fra guarantees tribal and non-tribal forest dwellers right over land they have been traditionally lived on, or depend for survival.

In May this year, Anil Garg, a Betul based advocate who has been studying the issue and published a book on it in 2017, decided to file a case on behalf of the people at the Betul collectorate. Garg says the problem has historical roots. “After the enactment of the Zamindari Abolition Act of 1950, which put a limit on the land an individual can own, states across the country passed similar legislations and acquired land. But there were many cases where the forest department scuttled attempts by the land revenue department to distribute the land among the landless by registering it as forest land. The Betul case is an example of this tripartite tussle,” he explains. “The district has about 0.12 million ha claimed by the two departments and the cumulative figure for Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh could be more than 9 million,” he adds.