Decision Vol.36 No.1 April 2009 pp.41-53. Decision is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Indian Institute of Management, Joka, Kolkata, India.
Case Study Peoples’ Strategies of Survival around Land Assets: Decisions Under Contrasting Situations Abhijit Guha Reader Department of Anthropology Vidyasagar University
[email protected]
Introduction Any human community employs certain strategies to survive and maintain livelihood in specific environs, especially when it encounters new situations. Mainstream strategic management discourse concerns itself only with profits of business enterprises, while natural resource management strategies by the people have to concern itself more directly with issues of access to assets and rules/institutions that delimit such access. While institutional conflicts remain important for business enterprises as well, it is possibly limited to daily enactments of a few top layers of the organization. In a community of small producers, in contrast, such concerns remain important across the community. The community level natural resource management strategies have another dimension. It is enacted by actors who are underprivileged and have to work against powerful state institutions, with its own set of legal institutions and arrangements which often force people (sometime under the rhetoric of development) to forgo their community and individual rights over land and forest which still provide livelihood opportunities for the majority of the inhabitants in the rural areas of our country. The strategies of land use by the marginalized communities and individuals therefore, have to operate under situations
of bargain, resistance and sometime silent but intelligent courses of action which often have to outwit legal managers of the state apparatus. Resistance movements, electoral compulsions of the democratic system and conflicts between traditional and formal legal norms create micro-domains of innovative action. In this article, we would narrate two case studies that offer descriptions of natural resource access and utilization by villagers in different regions of a single district (West Medinipur) of West Bengal in India. The empirical data for the case studies have been collected through first hand anthropological observation by the author and his research students over a period of more than a decade.
The first case narrates in some detail the unique strategies taken up by villagers to reclaim unrecorded land through different stages which helped them to minimize conflict and achieve distributive justice at the village community level. The second case describes innovative strategies employed by a group of peasants to bargain extra-legal compensation in a situation of agricultural land acquisition for setting up industrial units.
The cases demonstrate the capacity of poor and underprivileged villagers to adopt rational decisions in the face of changing environmental and policy situations. This rationality, being rooted in specifics of local institutions, often cannot be appreciated from ‘macro’ vantage points. The description of the local milieu thus provides valuable insights. Land Management at Dahi: Story of Grassroots Institutional Innovation Anthropological and sociological studies on Indian villages have shown that the villages are not only internally differentiated on the basis of caste, but they are also characterized by differences in the ownership, control, and use of arable land by different families. As early as 1974, Andre Beteille had emphasized that study of agrarian systems in India should center on the problem of land and its utilization for productive purposes (Beteille 1974). In this case study, we would describe an interesting process of land utilization and management by the village community through creating local institutions, which prevented conflict among the villagers. It also led to social sustainability of asset utilization and offered distributive justice in a village in Paschim Medinipur district of West Bengal (Guha, 2005). 2
The village under study is known as Dahi No. (J.L. 142) located in the Nayagram police station of the Jhargram Sub-division in Paschim (West) Medinipur district, West Bengal. Dahi is situated almost on the banks of Subarnarekha river, which is a perennial river with waterflows throughout the year. The village is interlinked with other villages and nearby urban centers and market places through roads. There were 122 households in the village (during 1990-91, i.e. at the time of our study) of which 62 (50.81%) belonged to the Sadgop caste, 20 (16.39%) to the Majhi, 15 (12.29%) to the Dhibars, 10 (8.16%) to Vaishnavas and the rest being Kshatriya, Napit, Bagdi, Bhumij, Tanti, Mahishya and Dhoba castes. Cultivation of food crops in Kharif and Rabi still remains the major economic activity of all castes in the village. A huge piece of semi lunar char land had emerged along the north and east side of the village when heavy floods in 1974 and 1978 kept many places in the region under water and cultivation on this land began only in 1985. The entire piece of land has an area of about 40 acres, according to the rough estimates of the local villagers and is yet to be recorded in the land and land records department of Government of West Bengal. As many as 60 households (49.11% of the total households) cultivated plots of land on this char where Aush paddy and various types of pulses and oil seeds were grown (Pradhan et.al.1992). Before, we go into details of cultivation on this specific char land, let us digress a little and take a quick glance at the phenomenon of char land in general. Rise of chars in Bengal rivers, particularly in North Bengal, is quite common. Chars are land masses of varying size which emerge as rivers change courses of flow. The land mass gradually stabilizes and becomes places of human habitation and cultivation of crops. Usually, char lands are sandy but they are also very much fertile owing to deposition of alluvial soil by river action. But chars may be submerged in river water again, if the river changes its flow path and that risk remains hanging over a piece of char land. The legal status of char as well as submerged land in West Bengal is quite interesting. According to the West Bengal Land and Land Reforms Act, the moment a piece of land submerges in water it becomes vested property, that is, property of the state, and when it emerges out of water the owner will have no claim over it. Chars are therefore always government property (which means that no individual can sell or purchase a plot of land in the char). The practice, however, is that the Land and Land 3
Reforms Department of districts rarely undertakes the routine business of measuring, mapping and recording of char land. Decade after decade passes but char lands are not recorded. The author of this paper had the opportunity to discuss the issue of the recording of char land with veteran surveyors and officers of the Land and Land Reforms Department of the Paschim Medinipur District during the study. The discussions revealed that the Land and Land Reforms Department officials have an apprehension that since chars may not be stable over a few years, so one should take time to record it and there is no guarantee that it will remain stable for long in future. On the other hand, the West Bengal Land and Land Reforms Act also does not have any provision to give land to those families whose lands are submerged in river water. The facts described above give rise to a situation of risk and uncertainty whenever some land is submerged and some other piece of land emerges as chars on the river bank. Suffice it to say that the virtual absence of State intervention in chars creates a space for the local community to play a major role in the use of char land. Chars become open access and/or common property resource characterized by both conflict and cooperation among the user groups. This has happened in case of the Dahi village. But how did people begin to own and cultivate plots on this char, which emerged through a natural process? Why could the few economically powerful families not grab most of the char land, especially since land is such an important asset in the rural milieu? The answer again has to be searched in the realm of sociopolitical dynamics of the study area. The cultivation of the continuous strip of char land adjoining our study village proceeded through 3 stages, which are described below. 1. In the first stage, i.e. just after emergence of the char land, a particular variety of tall grass locally known as khari ghas which grew abundantly on this land was cleared. The poorer villagers of the region collected this grass for thatching their roofs and also for preparation of various types of containers, for example, baskets. 2. In the second stage, the villagers of the area started to cultivate Aush paddy and pulses in this strip of land. During this period, clashes and feuds among the villagers of the region also took place over establishment of usufruct rights on the char.
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3. Finally, these conflicts paved the way for local political leadership to enter into the scene. The collective decision making process of the leadership led the way for some kind of social justice in the distribution of plots of land in the char. The local political leadership began to distribute plots of char land to villagers by following three unwritten rules worked out through successive meetings and discussions with the local people. So, these rules can be regarded as results of collective decisions. The rules may better be termed as Rules of Exclusion and are described in the following order. First RULE, allowed only inhabitants of Dahi, to cultivate on the char as the latter is connected with Dahi by a natural land bridge. The logic behind this rule was not simply geographical but it also reflected the sentiments of the local people. The people of villages other than Dahi did not object to this arrangement. Second RULE stipulated that even among the inhabitants of Dahi, those whose recorded agricultural land was flooded would not be allowed to cultivate the char land, as they might claim ownership (‘patta’) of such land through legal means. The logic behind this rule has to be seen in the context of the political leadership that was in action in managing the utilization of char land. The leaders belonged to the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist). If some households got the record of right on the char, it would have placed the land and land reforms department in a difficult situation. Third RULE required that an inhabitant of Dahi who was allowed to enter into the char could not employ hired labourers for clearing up the plot of char where he would raise crops; but during the actual process of cultivation one can employ hired labourers. This quite understandably prevented one from acquiring a fairly large amount of char land owing to demographic constraints, but at the same time allowed a family to operate within the fold of market economy. The unwritten rules innovated by the local political leadership through active participation with the villagers in connection with the establishment of usufruct rights can also be viewed as ‘constraints’ put up by the human agency in the utilization of natural resources. Under these rules, the utilization of char land could not take place by following the principle of ‘might is right’ or sheer violence backed by the muscle power
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of the ‘politically powerful’ in this area of Southwest Bengal. Instead, here in this case the local political leaders, through series of discussions and meetings with the villagers of the locality, could innovatively design the above rules, which not only curbed the possibilities of further violence but also protected the land records department of the government of West Bengal from being caught up in legal disputes. Because, every rule of exclusion also imply a rule of inclusion (Cernea 2005). It is interesting to note that these rules though unwritten were found to be followed by the villagers at the time of fieldwork. One important factor which made the rules almost obligatory for the villagers was definitely political. The statutory gram panchayats and the assembly constituency under which Dahi belonged was dominated by the ruling political party of the state and the personality of the then local CPI (M) MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly), Mr. Ananta Soren acted behind the command of those rules. But it was not the show of political power which made the rules powerful. There was a participatory approach on the part of the local MLA who devoted a lot of time and energy in restoring peace and resolving conflicts over the use of char land by local villagers. But there were definitely economic factors which played their roles in the continuance of the rules. It would be better if we look into some of the consequences of the rules. In the following paragraphs we would look into the consequences of the rules in terms of some quantitative data. In the following table, we have shown the use-right pattern of char land (Table 1). Here we observe that more than 85 per cent of households of the village have use-rights over less than 1 acre of char land. This means that most of the households using char land belong almost within the same landholding category; only 9 households had been able to have use-rights on more than one acre of land. This shows that on the char, at least up to the time of our fieldwork (which is 12 years after the char formation), a kind of egalitarianism prevailed in terms of land use and it ranged between 0.5 to 3 acres with only 2 families having use-rights on 2 acres or more land. Having described the political factor in terms of the decision making of the local leadership we now turn to one of the most important economic factor behind char land cultivation: recorded land holding of the households engaged in such type of cultivation. For this purpose, we have constructed Table 2 and made the following observations.
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1.In terms of recorded land holding the number of char cultivating households start increasing from the size category 0.5-1.00 acre and shows two peaks – one at 1.1-1.5 acres and the other at 2.1-2.5 acres; this number drops appreciably from the size category 3.1-3.5 acres (Table 2).
Table 1: Pattern of usufruct rights over char land in the village Size Category (in Acres) Below 0.5
17
(28.33)
0.5 – 1.00
34
(56.66)
1.1 – 1.5
7
(11.66)
Number of Households
1.6 – 2.00
No Households have been found
2.1 – 2.5
1
(1.6)
2.6 – 3.00
1
(1.6)
Total
60
99.97
Figures in parentheses represent percentages out of the total number of char cultivating households of the village.
Table 2: Ownership pattern of recorded landholding of all the households of the village vis-à-vis the use of char land Size category of recorded landholding (in acres)
Number of households
Number of Households who cultivates char
Below 0.5
7
(5.73)
1
(1.67)
0.5 – 1.0
20
(16.39)
7
(11.67)
1.1 – 1.5
17
(13.93)
12
(20.00)
1.6 – 2.0
12
(9.84)
8
(13.33)
2.1 – 2.5
21
(17.21)
13
(21.67)
2.6 – 3.0
17
(11.48)
11
(18.33)
3.1 – 3.5
5
(4.10)
2
(3.33)
3.6 – 4.0
6
(4.92)
4.1 and above
20
(16.39)
6
(10.00)
Total
122
(99.99)
60
(100.00)
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2. We also observe that in terms of recorded landholding nearly 90% of the char cultivating households possessed 0.5 to 3.00 acres of such type of land. 3. In order to observe whether there is any significant difference between the average recorded landholding of the households possessing char land and households without having any reclaimed char we have employed a two-tailed ttest; the sample size of the landholdings of these two groups are 60 and 621 respectively while the arithmetic means are 1.78 and 3.08 acres. Here the null hypothesis can be stated as following: there is no significant difference in the population between the means of recorded landholding of households with and without char land. By population we mean recorded landholdings of households under similar set of conditions as found in Dahi. With a degrees of freedom of 120 the value of t is 3.06 which falls, in the critical region at .05 and 01 levels of significance, that enables us to reject H0. The above findings and analyses show that the economic and political factors played significant roles in shaping the land reclamation process in a multi-caste village. In more specific terms, the households which owns more than 0.5 acres but less than 3.00 acres of recorded agricultural land and satisfy the terms and conditions set up by the local political leadership have a higher probability of cultivating the char among the households of Dahi irrespective of their caste affiliations. The third rule was most interesting. A cultivator on the char (who must be an inhabitant of Dahi and did not lose recorded land in the floods) would not be allowed to employ hired labourers for clearing up the plot of char where he would raise crops. However, one would be allowed to employ hired labourers during the actual process of cultivation, for example, ploughing, harvesting etc. This prohibition on labour employment under the context of a market economy and unequal economic power of the households, definitely put a check on the economically well off households from acquiring large amount of char land. This resulted in a fairly egalitarian landholding pattern on the char, where 85 per cent of the cultivators had been found to enjoy usufruct right over char land within the range of 1 acre. 1
It was earlier indicated that there were 122 households in the village
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But there is another aspect of this politics of resource management in this specific ecological situation. We have already seen that the various prohibitions introduced by the local level political leadership make the competition among village households a restricted affair – so that it keeps the situation under manageable proportions. One of the consequences of this resource management can be discerned by looking at the pattern of recorded landholding of the char cultivating households (Table 2). Our data also revealed another interesting point, viz. in terms of recorded landholding in the village, 85 per cent of the char cultivating households possessed 0.5 to 3.00 acres of recorded land. Secondly, most of the households, which went into, char cultivation owned recorded land within a range of 0.5 to 3.00 acres. This clearly shows that char cultivation also requires a given range of recorded landholding having its lower and upper limits. The households possessing more than 3.00 acres of land did not find it encouraging taking to char cultivation which would entail some out of the ordinary activities in terms of land clearing and maintenance of rights over plots at some distant place from the village habitation. On the other hand, the households, which possessed less than 0.5 acre of recorded land, might not have been not be equipped in terms of possessing the minimum infrastructure (e.g. a plough, a bullock etc.) to carry out agricultural operations on their own (Pradhan, et.al. 1992). Postscript We did not have opportunity to revisit and observe the land management scenario in the char land of Dahi until 2002. During that visit we found a fresh development in Dahi. It was learnt that for the last few years, the forest department of the State Government had started planting eucalyptus and akasmoni trees in some areas of the char land and several villagers who were cultivating the char did not like this new programme. They have a fear that since the char land has not still been recorded by the Land and Land Reforms Department, the government through forest department may encroach into the char and the rights of villagers to cultivate on the char may thus be endangered in future. Many villagers have also started to fell the trees from the forest department’s plantation and this is gradually giving rise to a new kind of conflict between the local people and the state
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over the char land. We have not however done further intensive fieldwork to enlighten our readers. . Bargaining Extra-Legal Compensation The area of our second case study lies on the bank of the river Kasai which is the largest river of Paschim Medinipur district. Cultivation of paddy (staple of the district) in the villages under study depends primarily upon rainfall and no systematic irrigation facilities have yet been developed by the Government. The villagers residing on the south eastern bank of the river cultivate a variety of vegetables on the land adjoining their homesteads owing to a very good supply of groundwater tapped through traditional dug wells. But just west of the South Eastern Railway track the groundwater level is not very congenial for cultivation of vegetables. The main agricultural activity on this side of the railway track is rain fed paddy cultivation for about four to six months of the year. Land for the two proposed big private industrial units had been acquired by the state government on the western side of the railway track during 1991-96 after the new thrust on industrialization. The protests launched by the landowning peasants of the Gokulpur-Amba (two of our study villages) against land acquisition took many forms, even though these did not last for a long period as it happened recently in Singur in the Hooghly district of West Bengal. Several peasants took up the statutorily available means/instruments to put up their objections against land acquisition under section 5A of the Land Acquisition Act during December 1995. A Government report dated 21.06.96 vividly recorded the objections and described in detail how the latter were overruled by the District Collector.
The objections submitted by 342 land losers contained the following points: (i) The acquisition of agricultural land would affect the farmers seriously by throwing them out of employment, (ii) the land losers will not get compensation at the rate they expect and (iii) the proposed acquisition is against public interest and is beyond the purview of the Act. It is interesting to observe how the concerned officials of the Land Acquisition Department overruled all the objections raised by the farmers. Before rejecting the objections, the officials, however, recognized the severity and magnitude of the acquisition. To quote from the report: 10
It is a fact that since large quantum of land is being acquired and the people chiefly subsist on agriculture many people will be seriously affected in earning their livelihood and avocation” (Departmental Report 1996). But this was the only sentence in the whole report which upheld the interests of the peasants. The rest of the 3-page report was devoted to justify the acquisition through the elaboration of some arguments. The arguments of the officials centered around the low agricultural yield of the lands which are monocrop in nature. Moreover the report also mentioned about the merits of the location of the land, which provided important infrastructure facilities for the industry like nearby railway line and the national highway. It is learnt from the report that during the hearing of the objections the petitioners could not “specify their individual difficulty in parting with the land” although the same report said that “most of the objectors submitted that they have no objection if employment is assured to them, in the company in favour of whom acquisition is being done.” It is not clear from the report why the authors of the same could not understand the nature of “individual difficulty” in parting with the land which is their main source of livelihood. Three points raised in the report are quite significant and shows the insensitive way of dealing with such an action on the part of the Government which was going to have a severe impact on the subsistence pattern of a group of rural cultivators in a monocrop region. Firstly, at one place the report mentioned: “It is worthwhile to point out that objections have been received only from 342 landowners for the acquisition of 526.71 acre which will affect at least 3000 landowners, if not more.” It seems the official position rested on the logic that as the overwhelming majority of farmers would not face any difficulty (at least there was no record of objection under the Land Acquisition Act) so there was no need to record any objection against this acquisition. Secondly, after citing the locational advantages of the land, the officials overruled objections regarding the question of earning a livelihood by saying that the proposal had been approved both by the screening committee and by the state after considering all aspects. Incidentally, the screening committee for the approval of any project comprises the Sabhadhipati of the panchayat samity (the second tier of the statutory local self-government) and the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) of the locality. It was obvious at that time that these
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people’s representatives who were members of political parties of the LFG would not object a proposal which had already been approved by the cabinet and the concerned ministries of their own Government. The temporal order of consultation and approvals appear important. Thirdly, the report dealt with the point ‘job for land’ simply by saying that the Land Acquisition Act does not provide any relief except compensation. But the Government may take up the matter with the company particularly for those farmers who would become landless and would be devoid of any source of earning a livelihood. After having overruled all the objections, the procedure for land acquisition made headway. Beside, recording objections within the legal framework of the Land Acquisition Act, the farmers of this area also took recourse to extra-legal means to fight against the acquisition of their agricultural land. The information on this part of the peasant protest have been collected from interviews of the leaders and participants of this movement as well as from press reports and the various written memoranda submitted by the villagers to the district and state administration. In the following section the succession of the important events of the peasant resistance has been described. The vast rural area which lies between Medinipur and Kharagpur townships is dominated by the two left political parties of the state, namely, CPI and CPI (M), which are also the major partners of the Left Front Government. The Congress, which is the opposition party in the state, has some followers in the area. This party being the major supporter of economic liberalization did not raise any objection when the news of industrialisation in this area came to be known. In fact, Congress welcomed this decision of the Left Government. They only raised doubts about whether the industrialists would at all choose West Bengal as a suitable site for industrialisation. In the study area Tata Metaliks was established on about 200 acres of agricultural land during 1991-92. Before the establishment of Tata Metaliks the leaders and cadres of CPI (M) and CPI organized meetings and continued individual level campaigns on the “bright possibility” of getting jobs by the land losers in the industry. But when the Tata Metaliks started production, the promise for providing jobs was proved to be a false one and the peasants also experienced the lengthy as well as tedious process of getting compensation from the district administration. All of these caused sufficient disillusionment among the peasants
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who were once hopeful about the positive effects of the establishment of an industrial estate in this region. The decision of the state government to acquire agricultural land in the same area for Century Textiles Company was taken under this background. The pessimism created among the peasants owing to the establishment of Tata Metaliks inspired some of the inhabitants of this locality to agitate against the acquisition of land for another pig-iron unit. The movement grained popularity under the leadership of Trilochan Rana [a former CPI(ML) leader] during 1995-96 who joined the trade union wing of the Congress Party and put considerable pressure on the district administration. Two interesting incidents may be mentioned in this regard which would throw some light on the reasons behind the popularity of this movement among the farmers. The first incident took place in the month of May 1995 when Trilochan Rana organised a good number of peasants to put a deputation to the Tata Metaliks Company authorities demanding some compensation for the damage caused by movement of trucks carrying goods for the company over unacquired agricultural fields (there was no crop in the fields at that time) of those farmers. The trucks damaged the dykes of the fields (ails) and the soil. Under the pressure of the peasants the company had to pay compensation in kind to 75 peasant families in presence of the pradhan (elected head of the lowest tier, i.e. gram panchayat of the statutory local self-government) of Kalaikunda GP. Some amount of fertiliser was given to those peasants whose lands were damaged. In the second incident Trilochan Rana put a deputation to the district administration about the damage caused to the unacquired agricultural fields of some peasants for putting pillars to demarcate acquired lands for Century Textiles Company in Kantapal, Mollachak and other adjoining villages. Those cement pillars were fixed by digging at about 4 sq.ft. of land to a depth of 3-4 ft. and became permanent structures right on the agricultural fields of the peasants whose lands were not acquired. These pillars served as the boundary of the acquired land for CTIL. About 24-25 such pillars were constructed in early 1996. The peasants argued that cultivation of fields over a much wider area around those pillars was not possible owing to physical obstruction. (Guha 2001) The district administration had to agree with this demand of the peasants and arranged for payment of Rs. 420/- as monetary compensation to those families affected by the
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construction of those pillars. This compensation payment continued for 2 years but with the decline of the movement the administration discontinued this compensation. Both these incidents reveal that under the pressure of an intelligent and organized peasant movement the company authority as well as the Land Acquisition Department had arranged compensation for peasant families having no provision under the existing legal and administrative framework. The movement reached its peak from the later part of 1995 up to April 1996 during which the farmers even resorted to violent means. In the first week of January 1996 hundreds of farmers in the Kalaikunda area stormed into the tent of the engineer who was conducting soil testing and land survey on behalf of Century Textiles Ltd. A leading national daily reported on 10 January 1996: Land Survey and soil testing work in Mathurakismat Mouza in the Kalaikunda gram panchayat area of Kharagpur rural police station undertaken by Century Textiles – a Birla group of Industries – had to be abandoned following stiff resistance from villagers last week….The farmers also blocked Sahachak for nine hours yesterday…They also lodged a complaint with the police against the firm” (The Statesman2 10 January 1996). On 22 March 1996, the same national daily reported about a mass deputation by a group of peasants of the Kharagpur region before the district administration (The Statesman 22 March 1996). In this deputation, the peasants demanded land for land or a job for the members of the land loser families. They also demanded a compensation of 3 lakh rupees per acre of agricultural land. After this deputation, about 100 farmers came to Medinipur Collectorate on 10 April 1996 and submitted a memorandum to the District Magistrate declaring that they would boycott the ensuing parliamentary election to protest against the acquisition of fertile agricultural land for industrial projects. The farmers stated in their letter that this acquisition would disturb the local economy and destabilize the environmental balance of the region and this event was also reported in The Statesman on 2 May 1996. It is important to note in this connection that neither the state or district level Congress leadership, nor any MLA of this party showed any interest in supporting this 2
The Statesman is a Calcutta based English language daily newspaper.
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movement of the peasants in Kharagpur region. The local CPI(M) leadership and the elected panchayat members of this area not only remained silent about this spontaneous movement of the peasants but they also made every attempt to smoother this agitation by labeling it as a disturbance created by Congress to stall the progress of industrialisation under Left Front Government. Without getting support from any opposition party and facing stiff resistance from the ruling left parties and lacking a coherent organization, this localized peasant movement against land acquisition gradually lost its intensity. The land losers also made an attempt to organize themselves by refusing to accept compensation money for a very brief period under the leadership of a few local leaders but this effort too did not last long and the movement finally lost steam in the Kalaikunda region. The Old Man and His Political Bullocks: Dealing With Risks By Semantics At the end of this case narrative an anecdote from the field may be illuminating. The event occurred near Kantapal village from where the huge chunk of land acquired for Century Textiles could be seen. The author was engaged in a discussion with the locals about the condition of the small dykes (‘ail’ in the local parlance) raised by the farmers to demarcate the plots of land possessed by different owners within the acquired area. Since no cultivation could be taken up for three successive seasons in the whole area it had turned into a grazing field and the dykes had started to break down. Two consequences of this situation followed. Firstly, farmers who still had unacquired land in the vicinity of the acquired area were facing difficulties in protecting their agricultural plots from the grazing cattle. Earlier there were other farmers who also shared the responsibility of driving out the cattle from the fields during agricultural season. Driving out the intruding cattle in paddy fields is always a collective affair in rural areas. After acquisition, the numbers of farmers have decreased in this area. Moreover, cows and buffaloes of the milkmen of the urban areas of Kharagpur town have also ventured to exploit this huge chunk of land. Secondly, after the breakdown of dykes the poorer people of the area who used to collect a good quantity of small fishes of various types from those agricultural plots as a common property resource, are not getting any fish in those plots. In the discussion three to four persons including one middle-aged women and old man were present. All of them were denouncing the Government for the take over of the fertile agricultural land for
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Century Company which had not yet been established. When the question arose that if people of this area had started to dislike the ruling party and the Government, then why did they cast their votes at the panchayat and assembly elections to the same party every year? The reply came from the old man which is reproduced here verbatim: “Look babu, we poor people always have to ride on some animal almost blindfolded. After the ride for sometime we start to realize whether it is a tiger or a bullock. But very often we have to twist its tail in order to keep it in proper direction” (translated freely from Bengali). All of us including the old man burst into laughter but soon we realized that the joke symbolized the gap between aspiration of the helpless local peasants in West Bengal and the distant national or global. Acknowledgements I must express my sincerest gratitude to my students of the department of Anthropology, Vidyasagar University, who took all the hardship to carry out the fieldwork without which the case studies for this paper could not have been developed. I am also greatly indebted to Prof.Biswatosh Saha of the Indian Institute of Management, Joka, who actually motivated me to write this paper and went through all the painful stages with me to give it the final shape. Last but not the least, I should thank all the anonymous readers of Decision whose perceptive comments for revising the paper greatly enriched my understandings about my own data.
References Beteille, A. 1974. ‘The Study of Agrarian Systems: An Anthropological Approach’, in Indian Anthropology Today, edited by D. Sen. Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University. Cernea, M. 2005. ‘Comment’ on A. Guha’s paper ‘An Anthropological Perspective on Sustainable Development: Lessons from Paschim Medinipur’. Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society 40: 151-162(2005) District Planning Committee: Village Based District Planning Process (1985). Midnapore.
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Guha, A. 2001.Land Acquisition Among The Cultivators of Rural Medinipur, West Bengal: An Anthropological Appraisal. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis Department of Anthropology, Vidyasagar University, India. Guha, A. 2005. ‘An Anthropological Perspective on Sustainable Development: Lessons from Paschim Medinipur’. Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society 40: 151-162(2005) Pradhan, H., A.Guha and F. Chakraborty 1992 ‘Land reclamation in a Village of West Bengal: A Case Study’ Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society27: 193-196 The Statesman 1996 News item dated 10 January 1996. Calcutta. The Statesman 1996 News item dated 22 March 1996. Calcutta. The Statesman 1996 News item dated 2 May 1996. Calcutta. West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation 1999. Destination West Bengal. Calcutta: WBIDC.
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