On May 30, 2021, as India reeled below the second wave of the pandemic, a crew of surveyors from Bihar’s income division landed up within the western city of Chhapra. At a avenue close to the town municipality constructing, the place the state authorities has proposed a brand new flyover, the officers measured the land the place retailers and houses can be demolished to make manner for the development.
About 35 individuals who reside and work in these buildings got here out to protest. The authorities had not provided them any compensation for the lack of land, they argued. But this was unsurveyed land and therefore public property, the crew retorted.
“We have been here for generations,” mentioned Atul Kumar, one of many protesters whose home and steel fabrication workshop are marked for demolition. “And now they are just asking us to leave without any compensation.”
Bihar is among the many eight Indian states–and two Union territories (together with Delhi)–that haven’t surveyed vital components of their geographical area–ranging from 2% in Rajasthan to 75% in Delhi–according to information compiled in 2020 by the National Council for Applied Economic Research. Among the states, Bihar has the best proportion of such unsurveyed land–20% of its space or 18,832 sq km, equal to the state of Nagaland. Most unsurveyed land lies in city areas in India, based on the NCAER research.
In over a decade, the Union authorities’s Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme, which seeks to offer states with monetary and technical assist to replace and digitise land data, has been capable of perform surveys on simply 3% of the whole geographical space of the nation. In 2020, the federal government launched the SVAMITVA programme to survey residential areas in rural areas however this mission leaves out city areas.
Why have so many areas in India been left unsurveyed and the way does this go away folks susceptible to eviction with none compensation? For solutions to those questions, we take a detailed have a look at Chhapra’s case.
To start with, solely farms
Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Bihar, Haryana, Karnataka, Manipur, Delhi, Rajasthan, Punjab, Telangana and West Bengal lack data for components of their land space, based on the NCAER, which obtained the knowledge from state governments as part of its effort to create a Land Records Services Index that measures the standard of state land data. The information on unsurveyed land relate to solely unforested areas.
There are completely different causes for why numerous areas remained surveyed, a lot of them going again to the time the British administered India. While preliminary land surveys in India date again to the Mughal Empire, probably the most outstanding ones have been carried out by the colonial authorities within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, based on a report of the division of land assets below the Ministry of Rural Development.
But the British solely surveyed agricultural lands, leaving out inhabited areas of villages and cities in addition to forests, mentioned Deepak Sanan, a retired Indian Administrative Service officer and lead creator of the NCAER research. “The point [for the British] was to survey areas from where land revenue came,” he mentioned.
After India adopted its Constitution in 1950, the upkeep of land data turned the state governments’ duty. They have been speculated to survey all of the lands once more however the tempo of this work various, usually grinding to a near-halt in some states, Sanan mentioned.
Slopes, mining zones, riverine lands excluded
As a United Nations Development Programme report present in Odisha, land surveys have been carried out on solely flat land; slopes past the 10-degree gradient have been labeled as uncultivable wasteland. But these stretches are cultivated by tribal households with out land titles.
In Karnataka’s Ballari district, lands belonging to 12 villages that have been part of the previous princely state of Sandur have been speculated to be surveyed below a 1977 legislation however this has not been accomplished but. The villages are in iron ore mining areas and with no land rights in hand, villagers got here below strain to promote their land to mining firms and associated infrastructure models.
Unsurveyed lands in Bihar are referred to as ‘topo’ lands and are largely located on the banks of silt-laden rivers just like the Ganga that shift their course each few a long time, creating new land parcels. The first surveys in Bihar have been carried out by the British between 1905 and 1915 and not noted lands that subsequently emerged from the river. In 1959, the Bihar authorities determined to hold out a revisional land survey, however this has nonetheless not been accomplished regardless of a 2011 legislation requiring its expedition, based on a proactive disclosure below the Right to Information Act by the state income and land reforms division.
There are extra states, akin to Chhattisgarh, which haven’t surveyed forested lands. In India’s north-eastern area most states have surveyed solely city lands and never community-controlled rural areas, mentioned Sanan of NCAER.
To tackle the shortage of surveys on forest lands, the Forest Rights Act of 2006 required that unsurveyed habitations inside forests be transformed into income villages earlier than recognising the rights of Adivasis and conventional forest-dwellers.
This exclusion of forests and inhabited areas from land surveys is an important hole in land governance, mentioned Sanan, as a result of “forest areas are the most vulnerable lands, while inhabited lands are economically valuable”.
In 2008, the federal government included a part in its land data modernisation programme to offer funds and technical help to states to hold out surveys on lands, as we mentioned. However, it has made simply 3% progress since then–and that features information for the resurvey of already surveyed land, based on the scheme’s progress dashboard.
In 2020, the federal government launched one other programme to survey lands. The SVAMITVA (Survey of Villages Abadi and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas) scheme, below the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, aimed to survey inhabited areas in villages and difficulty property playing cards to residents. But the scheme leaves out city inhabited areas like in Chhapra, which represent the most important chunk of unsurveyed lands, because the NCAER research discovered.
State coverage not clear
In Chhapra, the under-construction flyover passes by a densely populated neighbourhood and requires the partial demolition of 295 buildings, based on a letter from the district collector of Saran (which covers Chhapra) to the state income division in June 2020. Yet, the world is unsurveyed land and there’s no provision below legislation to grant land titles to the folks dwelling there, the letter mentioned.
In 2015, the Patna High Court held that the state authorities couldn’t evict folks from unsurveyed land below the Bihar Public Land Encroachment Act 1956 as a result of “the nature of [unsurveyed land] is yet to be established by the authorities” and therefore will not be “public land” as per the Act. But, in 2017, the state’s legislation division mentioned that each one unsurveyed lands have been state property.
Legislators have usually raised questions within the state meeting about the necessity to survey such lands. In 2018, Mithilesh Tiwari mentioned there was “a large chunk of land in Bihar, particularly along the rivers” that was unsurveyed. “People have been living on it for centuries and the government even takes taxes,” Tiwari mentioned. The authorities responded by assuring that it might deliver out a coverage on unsurveyed lands “soon”.
“There are huge tracts of unsurveyed land in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh along the Himalayan rivers like Ganges and Gandhak,” mentioned a Bihar authorities official intently concerned in land governance, who declined to be recognized as he’s not an authorised spokesperson.
The Bihar income division has, on a number of events since 2019, thought of creating a coverage to survey unsurveyed however occupied lands, based on the agenda of the division’s conferences with district collectors (see right here and right here).
But there is no such thing as a coverage but. In March 2021, state income and land reforms minister Ram Surat Kumar mentioned in an interview that the state authorities had discovered that “land mafia” was concerned in grabbing unsurveyed lands. Hence the federal government had arrange a committee to provide you with methods to grant possession to the rightful occupants of such lands.
In January 2021, Chhapra’s district collector issued a memo to Bihar Raj Pul Nirman Nigam Limited, the state authorities company that oversees flyover constructions, stating that disputed and unsurveyed land belongs to the federal government. The state, the letter mentioned, would solely reimburse the price of demolition if the residents have been to demolish the marked properties themselves, based on a writ petition filed earlier than the Patna High Court by 30 residents.
On March 10, the court docket ordered establishment on the undertaking. The case continues to be being heard.
Chhapra protests
Saran district collector Nilesh Deore informed IndiaSpend that the state advocate common had in 2017 mentioned that lands that come up on riverbeds are authorities property. Following this, the state authorities stopped any registration or mutation of properties in unsurveyed lands, together with the disputed space in Chhapra. Deore declined to remark additional stating that the matter was pending earlier than the High Court. “The total area for demolition is just 61 decimals (0.61 acres). This is an important project which will ease traffic congestion,” he mentioned.
In their petition earlier than the excessive court docket, the residents have submitted documentary proof of their possession of the land together with property taxes and sale deed documents–some of it courting again to the Nineteen Thirties.
“Merely because land has not been surveyed, [it] cannot be a ground to draw a presumption adverse to the interest of the citizens,” their petition argued. It asks for a course to the state to not dispossess them till the surveys are accomplished and their proper to the land is determined.
Affected residents have organised because the Chhapra Shahar Bhumiswami Sangathan (Chhapra City Landowners Association), held press conferences to air their views and carried out avenue marches. They have mentioned that they’re keen to surrender their claims if they’re paid compensation. They have additionally questioned how their land, within the coronary heart of the town, was left unsurveyed.
“The district collectorate and district courts are also located between our houses and the Ganges river. If we are on unsurveyed lands then so are they,” mentioned Atul Kumar, one of many protesters in Chhapra.
The land did ultimately get surveyed–on May 30, 2021, throughout the pandemic–but this was for the development work and to not create land data. That night, the income official main the survey filed a prison case in opposition to the residents who had protested, charging them with voluntarily inflicting damage, stopping a public official from discharging their obligation, and violating the Covid-19 protocol below the Disaster Management Act, 2005, as per the First Information Report filed with the police. In his criticism, the official mentioned that the ‘establishment’ order of the High Court didn’t apply to the survey.
The Bihar authorities ought to have carried out a survey by now on the land, mentioned Pranab Ranjan Choudhury, director of the Center for Land Governance in Bhubaneshwar. “And if this was encroachment, then the state should say why it wasn’t removed earlier, and whether the responsible official was penalised,” he identified.
Choudhury mentioned that even when the occupants are encroachers, they’re depending on the land and have to be provided compensation and rehabilitation to keep away from battle. In Odisha, the state provided land titles to residents of casual settlements, and within the case of the Ahmedabad Metro, the Gujarat authorities provided rehabilitation after verifying property claims utilizing out there documentary proof, household timber, and participatory value determinations, he mentioned. In the case of the Ahmedabad Metro, all affected persons are eligible for compensation and rehabilitation regardless of their land possession standing.
Former bureaucrat Sanan mentioned that if the state admits the rights of the folks, it must purchase the land below the Land Acquisition Act and pay double the market charge as compensation. Now that the state has the authorized opinion to again it, it might moderately classify the occupants as encroachers to get the flyover constructed rapidly, he mentioned.
