Internal initiative Archives

Land has been at the crux of inequity ever since man started equating it with power. Bihar, with its semi feudal make up, is an unfortunate example of severe land-based disparity. Upto 70% of the rural poor in several districts are landless, working on leased land and handing over more than half their gross output almost double of what is normally paid elsewhere.

There is little scope to question the system. Most of the land records date back to before independence, the bureaucracy consists of land owning gentry and the system itself is informal. There is therefore, very little scope for the tenant to get legal protection. Centuries of exploitation have left the landless poor too weighed down by debts and poverty to have the strength to change their circumstances.

The state is in urgent need of political will to make the land reforms that exist on paper, account for something. Despite the Bhoodan Yagna Committee, the Bihar Zamindari Abolition Act and the Land Ceiling Act, Bihar stands as a caricature of democracy, where the lives of the landless majority depend on the whims of the few who own land.

Since landlessness and its related effects on the lives of the poor and the marginalised has always been an issue that Praxis feels strongly about, it undertook a land mapping exercise, along with Ekta Parishad, in the districts of Western Chamaparan, Gaya, Nawada, Jamui and Patna . This was done to identify specific issues relating to land distribution and prospects relating to allotment of land to the huge number of landless households in the state. Outcomes of the exercise are expected to help in effective campaigning for land rights of the poor with the backing of hard data relating to availability of distributable land in areas selected for mapping.

The exercise has so far been undertaken across over thirty five panchayats drawn from five districts of Bihar - Gaya, Jamui, Nawada, Patna and West Champaran, and includes the following steps:

1. Identification and training of a village level team of cartographers, mostly agricultural labourers or sharecroppers familiar with the distribution of land in their village.
2. Mapping of land holdings in terms of location and boundaries, legal ownership, actual control, nature of disputes, type of land, duration of control, productivity and plot no. as per government record (“Register 2”) etc.
3. Verification of the contents of the map in a public forum, whereby about fifty adult villagers endorse the veracity of the map by formally approving it.
4. Digitisation of land records, giving each recorded plot a unique number and entering corresponding records in an electronic database, along with digital copy of the map.

Specific insights that the process of land mapping seeks to capture are the following:

• Identification of villagers owning more land than permitted by the amended version of Bihar Land Reforms (Ceiling, Land Allocation and Surplus Land Acquisition) Act 1961.
• Identification of Bhoodan / Gair Majarua / other forms of government land that can be made available for distribution to landless households
• Identification of homeless persons for pursuing their legal entitlement to homestead land.
• Identification of villagers whose long-standing occupancy of disputed land holdings calls for formalisation of the holdings in their name.
• Praxis will soon publish the experience of undertaking land mapping in Bihar and organise debates around issues and prospects identified through the exercise in the days to come.

The year 2007 was a particularly bad one for rural Bihar. The dams around several rivers broke, pushing 10,000 villages across twenty two districts into a quagmire of ruined livelihoods and consequents debts. Yet another episode, to be borne stoically, in the lives of the millions that are indescribably poor and powerless.

In the aftermath of the floods emerged a forum that can be described only as a welcome life jacket: Dalit Watch. The mandate of this forum is to fight against the deliberate exclusion of dalits from relief and rehabilitation processes. In a larger context it is a fight to give dalits their right to participate in the process of development.

Several organisations like National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), Bachchpan Bachchao Andolan, Dalit Samanvay, Nari Gunjan and Lok Shakti are a part of this forum.

One of the initiatives that this forum has taken is to produce a critical mass of 10,000 dalit leaders. These individuals will be picked from various grassroots level organisations and contexts and empowered to act as opinion makers and influencers of their community.

Praxis has been a part of this forum as a facilitator, assisting with capacity building programmes and strategy formulation and helping the forum in the all-important task of taking into account the community perspective.

Praxis, in partnership with Vidyasagar Samajik Suraksha Seva Sodh Sansthan (VSSSSS), organized a pre-budget discussion in the Legislative Council Auditorium of Bihar on February 8, 2007. The discussion was attended by distinguished Members of Legislative Council of Bihar, the Auditor General of the State, reputed academicians, scientists and representatives of prominent civil society organizations and networks. During the discussion, issues regarding budgetary outlays and utilizations relating to important social sector areas were examined, and recommendations were made towards revival of SC Sub-plan, devolution of finances favouring Panchayati Raj Institutions and increase of allocations and utilizations favouring critical sectors like primary education, primary health care and agriculture.

Praxis has entered into a partnership with a select number of gram panchayats in Bihar, with the objective of establishing or strengthening inclusive processes at the level of panchayats. To this effect, Praxis is working towards emergence of representative groups of citizens to (1) monitor delivery of basic services, (2) act as a channel for exchange of vital information between people and panchayats and (3) feed into the planning and budgeting processes of the panchayat by acting as conveyers of priorities and aspirations of citizens based in different development wards. Elected members of the panchayats, who are divided across different thematic standing committees, are expected to work closely with nominated citizen-representatives in various panchayat processes and in preparation of development plans and budgets.

In November 2007, Praxis facilitated an orientation of a select group of Block Development Officers, NGO representatives and nominated functionaries of relevant government agencies, vis-à-vis issues of exclusion and issues in planning of shelf of projects for implementation of NREGA in Bihar. The training was organized by the National Institute of Rural Development in Patna in collaboration with the Government of Bihar.

We revisited Bolangir in the summer of 2006 to take stock of changes in the conditions surrounding some of the poorest communities that we had spent time with on an earlier study done in 1998. The study of ‘98 was to inform the Western Orissa Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The '06 visit was a proactive one to find out if the studies that take place necessarily influence or inform concrete changes and make a difference to the life of the poor and the marginalized.

One dark, sultry night in the month of July, circa 2007, the embankments around the river Kamalabalan in Darbhanga district of Bihar, crumbled. Yet again. In a span of a few hours, lives, livelihoods, hopes and aspirations were washed away, leaving the villages in a quagmire of debts, diseases and migration.

For the last 60 years, this once beautiful district of Bihar has been violated again and again by both greed and indifference. Those with power, play their might against the might of nature, changing the course of rivers, leaving the poor and the marginalised to face the consequences.

The authorities of course refuse to play refree. Following the floods a team from Praxis waded deep into the lives of people here, in a bid to capture the reality and poke those who refuse to see in the eye.

The result was Waters of Despair, a 30-minute documentary that brings alive on screen the distress that has come to typify the lives of those who stay in the flood prone areas of Darbhanga.

We also published a book Dateline Ghanshyampur on the same issue.

Relief and rehabilitation processes are not equipped to cater to the special needs of the elderly during a disaster such as that of the Bihar floods. Every disaster gives the aged a new set of memories of exclusion. The film holds the state accountable for its apathy towards the elderly and advocates for the rights of the elderly to get access to relief and rehabilitation, as much as any other citizen.

Millions of migrant workers from Bihar and other poor states of India live in conditions of abject deprivation vulnerable to attacks against their fundamental human and labor rights for no other reason than, that they are poor and can’t influence policy makers and implementers. The film in brief is a journey through the triumphs and traumas faced by migrant workers in their state of origin and destination both. 2008