Chitrangada Choudhury - Adivasis and the New Land Acquisition Act
Much work remains to be done if the new Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act has to mark a meaningful shift for India’s adivasi communities.
Among the worst excesses committed in India’s six decade-old democracy, the forcible displacment of rural Indians in the name of nation-building ranks high up. And within this, the brunt of the oppression, emanating from the state’s claim of eminent domain, has been borne by India’s adivasis. In 2011, the Twelfth Five-Year Plan blandly noted that of the estimated 60 million people displaced in development projects since independence, as many as 40% were adivasis; their share in the general population has hovered around 8%. That Indian society lacks quantitative or qualitative insight into violence against such communities for developmental and industrial projects is a measure of how policymakers and citizens have routinely devalued the adivasi point of view and experience.
The adoption of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 ( LARR Act), which received the presidential assent on 26 September, marks a long overdue move to end the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, the primary instrument through which the state forcibly evicted its citizens. The new law is potentially a step towards greater justice for adivasi communities.
The LARR Act states that as far as possible, land will not be acquired in the scheduled areas. Though in a damaging omission, which should be corrected, the Act makes no reference to adivasis who live in areas that are still not covered by the Fifth Schedule, which is an estimated 50-70% of the adivasi population, according to the National Advisory Council. If acquisition is done, the Act goes on to say, it will only be done, “as a demonstrable last resort”. Much will hinge on how rules currently being drafted for the Act define this ambiguous “last resort” principle. Given official estimates that 90% of India’s coal reserves are located in adivasi areas, as are 50% of other key minerals and prospective dam sites, it is easy to envisage governments and elites continuing to deploy the “national interest” argument to jettison adivasi interests for such projects.
Informed Consent
The far more meaningful provision for adivasi communities is that acquisition in scheduled areas will be now be subject to the free, prior and informed consent principle. This is what the relevant (and rather clumsily worded) clause states:
“In case of acquisition or alienation of any land in the Scheduled Areas, the prior consent of the concerned Gram Sabha or Panchayats or autonomous District Council, at the appropriate level in Scheduled Areas under the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution, as the case may be, shall be obtained, in all cases of land acquisition*, including acquisition in case of urgency, before issue of a notification under this Act, or any other Central Act or a State Act for the time being in force..” *(emphasis added)
This by far is the most unequivocal recognition in law of a people’s constitutional right to participate in decision-making over projects that affect it, and more importantly, to be able to say no to such projects. The clause is an essential acknowledgement of the numerous, and increasingly intense, protests unfolding across adivasi blocks of central India, despite state and police efforts to intimidate and stamp down such citizen movements against forced displacement. However, given numerous instances of officials and corporations usurping gram sabha powers, the Act should have recognised violation of the consent clause as an offence, to be penalised by fines or imprisonment, just as it has laid down such penalties for violation of compensation and resettlement clauses.
Independent Social Impact Assessment of Proposed Projects
Given the socially and environmentally damaging legacy of mines, industries and dams in adivasi areas, the other important corrective the LARR mandates is an independent social assessment of proposed projects. Over almost two decades, project proponent-commissioned Environmental Impact Assessment reports have amply demonstrated that such documents provide an impoverished ‒even dishonest‒ account of how large projects impact local populations. Prepared by company-hired consultants, EIA reports see no need to engage with to-be-displaced communities to capture their concerns and ties to ecology. They might put forward arcane emission charts, but they never tell villagers the number of Mahua trees that will be destroyed, and how this will directly reduce annual family incomes in the affected area. As scholar and activist Ganesh Devy argues, language is a profound repository of ecological knowledge. The practice of conducting all decision-making processes around clearing projects in non-adivasi languages has provided a mechanism to systematically understate impacts on local populations and their habitats... read more:
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