In Orissa’s drought prone Balangir district, the four acres of land that Madan Kand of Ghumer once possessed was the only source of livelihood. Drought was regular, yet he was somehow managing his expenditures from his limited land holding.
However, a new form of land-grabbing has ripped him off the tiny possession and Madan came to know about this only recently. He had been made to believe that he had just leased out the land to Taj Gases Ltd for Jatropha plantation from which he will start getting share profits after the third year of plantation.
Taj has fraudulently made poor farmers like Madan to sign sales deeds instead of lease deeds and alienated them from their land possessions. “So far I have found 10 companies which have alienated 200 acres of land in the district similarly,” says Balangir collector R Santhagopalan.
“But that is just the tip of the iceberg”, complains M Govindu, member of a team of farmer leaders that visited the Patnagarh area, which was badly hit by land-grabbing.
“In the name of promoting cotton and jatropha, they are denying land rights of poor farmers in a systematic manner,” alleges Prafulla Samantra of Lok Shakti Abhijan.
Orissa is one of the few states in the country that has opened its doors for “contract farming” through amendments to the Orissa Agricultural produce markets (Amendment) Act, 2006. In fact, the government has already envisaged plans to go for large-scale farming, mostly in cotton, spices, sugarcane, medicinal plants and bio-diesel. This year alone, the government had plans to bring about 32,600 hectares of cotton cultivation under contract farming.
“Land grabbing has become a corporate phenomenon,” says Durga Prasad Nayak. While the cost of agriculture production is sky-rocketing, the cushion to absorb shocks from crop failures hasn’t changed. As farming is becoming unviable compared to other businesses, farmers fall prey to land-grabbers.
Contract farming is just one form of land grabbing. Converting forest lands for other purposes is however more direct and in most cases state sponsored. By an estimate, since 1982 over 30,331 hectares of land — categorised as forest — have been diverted for other purposes.
Corporate land-grabbing has taken various shapes and the government has been party to that. “The land bank scheme which the government is proposing, in order to facilitate easy and quick disbursement of land to industries, is a very dangerous one,” cautions Nayak. To start with, the government has asked to identify government lands only, but those who know the way the industry lobby works have no doubts that this is not limited to government land only.
In fact, the most important activity of the “The Orissa Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDCO)” is to procure, through alienation or acquisition, land for industries. IDCO claims to have “a bank of 20,000 acres of highly suitable land for industrial purpose”. It has already handed over 7,300 acres of them to different industrial projects.
Some allege that the Kalinganagar incident took place due to Dalali type of business by IDCO. It procured land from people, mostly tribal, at throw away prices and cornered heavy profit by charging substantially higher from private industrial promoters.
Thus, many do not find fault with the TATA, but blame IDCO.
