National Award win helps Nanjiyamma bring to limelight her fight against land grab

A long-pending land grab case in Palakkad district’s Attappadi tribal village is getting its deserved hearing with officials concerned, after it was revealed that the complainant was national award winner, Nanjiyamma.

The tribal folk singer won the 68th National Award for best female playback singer for a song she wrote and sang for the Malayalam movie Ayyappanum Koshiyum. Nanjiyamma, now in her sixties, has been fighting a legal battle for decades against the alleged encroachment of her four-acre ancestral property by land mafia.

And Nanjiyamma is not alone in her legal battle against land grabbing. Several other tribal families in the locality, too, had filed petitions with the district authorities about the encroachment.

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The hearing was scheduled for Tuesday by the district collector, but had to be postponed in light of the weather-related emergency the administrative officer had to handle by attending meetings with ministers.

An official at the collectorate said that they hadn’t known that one of the complainants was Nanjiyamma. Her plight was known to the district administration only when she recently lamented her decades-long fight against encroachment into tribal people’s land.

For that reason, there were concerns about moving the hearing which was scheduled for Tuesday. Nanjiyamma and the others were informed about the unavoidable situation, and the sitting was rescheduled for August 10, said the official.

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Nanjiyamma, during a meet the press last week in connection with her national award win, had revealed about her fight for regaining the ancestral land. She said that land mafias with political backing were encroaching the land of tribal people using fake documents.

She also accused the police of preventing the tribals from entering their own land until the case was settled. She also lamented that the tribal families had to spend their hard-earned money to fight cases in court against influential lobbies.