Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s top agenda to usher land reforms in the country, especially in tribal areas, has evoked poor response from the states, even the Congress-ruled ones.
Sources said despite the report of the Committee on State Agrarian Relations and The Unfinished Task in Land Reforms having been sent to the 28 states for their opinion more than six months ago, only Arunachal Pradesh, Lakshadweep, Haryana and Chhattisgarh have responded so far.
The committee, set up by Dr Singh in January 2008 during UPA I, had submitted its report in 2009. Sources said land reforms being a sensitive issue, the states are trying to buy time. “States will have to take the step forward as the subject lies in their domain,” said a top government official, admitting that the matter demands urgent attention in the light of the growing Naxal violence in the tribal areas. The report highlighted that tribals and Scheduled Castes, prime concerns of the UPA, have been the worst hit due to massive transfer of agricultural and forest land to match the aspirations of a developing nation. The committee made a special mention that declining operational holdings size and the ownership size indicated that the corpus of tribal land is in serious danger of erosion. This is proved by the fact that though they are just nine per cent of the population, the tribal communities have contributed over 40 per cent of the total land acquired so far. The committee further said that massive transfers of agricultural and forest land for industrial, mining and infrastructure projects have created rural unrest and distress migration. Expressing his concern on the issue, the PM has said there has been a systemic failure in giving the tribals a stake in the modern economic processes that inexorably intrude into their living spaces.