The terrible track record of land governance in India

She waited for the men accompanying our research team to step away from her hurriedly made tent of sticks and sarees. And then she held one of us and wept. Chanda of Barkuta village was inconsolable. Lying all around us was rubble that was once her home. Through her tears, she narrated how the district administration came with bulldozers one morning and broke up her little house that she had built bit by bit with all her savings. She moved a large piece of what used to be the wall of her house so we could see tiny green saplings. The administration that came to wreck her house had destroyed the sacks of grain they had harvested that year. They spread the grain on the ground and since it had rained, the grain had sprouted. Beating her chest with her frail hands, she said the grain was worth at least a lakh. It would have fed her family for a year. In another village, Raliya, Babita, a feisty young girl of all — women family spoke about how their house was targeted first for demolition by the administration. No one else from the village came to help, she lamented, as that would put their families at risk. Babita had stood in front of the bulldozer and for that she had been jailed for three nights.

These homes in Chhattisgarh had been acquired in the 1970s under the Coal Bearing Areas Act of 1957 Back then, those who were issued notices for acquisition were promised INR 10,000 and a home in the city of Korba. Those promises never materialised and neither did the acquisition, until recently, when one of the largest coal mines of Asia, Ghevra, was to be expanded. By 2016, the mine swallowed these villages. The stories of land acquisition and the failure of the state to provide rehabilitation of a quality fit for human communities are innumerable. But in the country we live in today, while land acquisition is legal, the rehabilitation of evicted people is no longer upheld as a right. All the women who stood waist deep in the Narmada waters, even as the Prime Minister dedicated the Sardar Sarovar project to the nation to mark his birthday, were merely asking for 100 per cent rehabilitation prior to their homes being submerged.  

Over 40 million people have been coerced out of their homes as a necessary “sacrifice” for the greater common good. But that is not the only narrative of eviction. Big and small Indian cities are undergoing a major transformation in the name of slum redevelopment, slum rehabilitation, housing improvement and urban conservation. And urban residents living in low-cost or informal housing are told that these schemes are for their own benefit. But these euphemisms camouflage the state’s role as an agent of dishousing. Architect scholars of Mumbai, Hussain Indorewala and Shweta Wagh have painstakingly documented the city government’s disingenuous efforts to create “better housing” and “open spaces”. Wagh’s careful documentation of over 25 community housing areas in Mumbai shows that rather than the resident’s need to improve their housing, it is the value of the premium lands that drives the city’s development planning. Poor residents of the city have been displaced, rendered squatters or have had to watch their homes being razed to the ground. Despite legal rights and public participation procedures, these urban residents have had to fight very tough battles to retain their homes.

On the other side are technocrats, real estate contractors, international planning consultants and numerous middlemen.

One of this government’s most ambitious schemes “Housing for all” was launched in 2015. While India needs better housing, who will contain the state’s muscle to systematically dishouse its poorest citizens? State and central governments have so far refused to address the issues of forced and illegal evictions, criminalisation of residents protecting their homes and poor or no rehabilitation prior to eviction. If these are not held as the core values of land governance, then any development plan or housing scheme should be taken to mean its opposite.

The authors are with the CPR-Namati Environment Justice Program.