Showing posts with label land. Show all posts
Showing posts with label land. Show all posts

25/07/15

what the brahmin can't hide, bury or burn anymore

south, karnataka. there are 17.9 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 4.5 lakh are sc households, and 1.7 lakh are st households. who are the other 11.7 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin households..lingayat and vokkaliga households would also figure, i guess.
‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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west, maharashtra. there are 47.6 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 9.4 lakh are sc households, and 10.3 lakh are st households. who are the other 27.9 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, maratha and kayasth households..
‪#obc‬ ‎‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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east. west bengal. there are 75.6 lakh landless households in the state. of these, 25.4 lakh are sc households and 6.1 lakh are st households. who are the other 44.1 lakh landless households? the statesman and the telegraph and the hindu will probably tell you that they're mostly brahmin, baidya and kayasth households.
‪‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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west, north. rajasthan. there 26.74 lakh landless households in rajasthan. of these, 7.91 lakh are sc households, and 4.39 lakh are st households. who are the other 14.44 lakh landless households? the hindustan times and the hindu will probably tell you they're all brahmin, rajput and bania households..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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north, uttar pradesh..there are 79 lakh landless households in the state. of these, 26 lakh are sc households and around 62, 000 are st households. who are the other 52.38 lakh landless households? the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, rajput, bania households..
‪‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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east, again. jharkhand. there are 11.57 lakh landless households in the state. of these, 2.27 lakh are sc households and 2.61 lakh are st households. who are the other 6.7 lakh landless households? the hindustan times and toi will probably tell you they're all brahmin and rajput households..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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northmost, uttarakhand. there are nearly 2.8 lakh landless households in uttarakhand. of these, over 84, 000 are sc households and over 9,200 are st households. who are the other 1.86 lakh landless households? the hindustan times and the hindu will probably tell you they're all brahmins and rajputs..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus
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centre, north, madhya pradesh. there are over 50 lakh landless households in the state. nearly 10.45 lakhs of those are sc households, and 13.92 lakh are st households. who are the other 26.35 lakh landless households? if you ask the toi or the hindustan times, they'll probably tell you they're mostly brahmin, rajput, bania households..
‪‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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east, odisha. there are over 34 lakh landless households in odisha. nearly 8.7 lakh of them are sc households and over 8 lakh of them are st households. who are the other 17.3 lakh landless households? the statesman and the indian express will probably tell you they're all brahmins and karanas.
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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further west or north, haryana. there are 11. 26 lakh landless households in haryana..over 5 lakh of them are sc households and 380 are st households. who are the other nearly 6.2 lakh households? the hindustan times and outlook will probably tell you they're all jat, brahmin and bania households.
‪‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus‬
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east, bihar. there are nearly 96 lakh landless households in the state. nearly 23 lakh of them are sc households, and 1.6 lakh are st households. who are the other 71.4 lakh households? if you ask epw or india today, they'll tell you most of them are brahmin, bhumihar, rajput etc households..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
west, gujarat. there are 25.5 lakh landless households in gujarat. around 2.7 lakhs of them are sc households, and 5.2 lakhs are st households. who are the other 17.6 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu or the toi, they'll tell you they're all brahmin, vaishya or rajput households.
‪‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus‬
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chhattisgarh. there are 16.88 lakh landless households in the state. of these 4.7 lakh are st households and 3. 3 lakh sc households. who are the other 8.8 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu or the toi, they'll tell you they're all brahmin or rajput households.
‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus
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‬ there are over 56 lakh landless households in tamil nadu, and around 19 lakh of them are dalit.. 94, 000 are st households. who are the other nearly 36 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu it will tell you that all of them are brahmin.
‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus
~‬
north, west, punjab. there are 14.8 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 9.3 lakh are sc households, and 111 are st households. who are the other 5.5 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, jat, khatri households.
‪‪#obc‬‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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south, andhra pradesh. there are 45 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 10.8 lakh are sc households, and 2.5 lakh are st households. who are the other 31.7 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, reddy, kamma, raju, velama households.
‪‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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south, kerala. there are 25.34 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 4.2 lakh are sc households, and nearly 55000 are st households. who are the other nearly 20.6 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin and nair households.
‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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north, himachal pradesh. there are 80, 222 landless households in the state. of these, nearly 28, 800 are sc households, and 3,951 lakh are st households. who are the other nearly 47, 500 landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin and rajput households.
‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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east, north. assam. there are 18 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 1.7 lakh are sc households, and nearly 1.3 lakh are st households. who are the other nearly 15 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin and kayasth households.
‪‪#obc‬‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
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telangana, temporarily indian. there are 19.7 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 4.7 lakh are sc households, and 1.97 lakh are st households. who are the other nearly 13.3 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, reddy, velama, kamma, raju households.
‪#obc‬‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬

you may try to hide it, bury it, burn it - but the larger truth is out: in brahmin india - from east to west, north to south- there are nearly 6.86 crore landless households. of these, nearly 1.81 crore are sc households, and nearly 70 lakh are st households. who are the other 4.34 crore landless households? they're definitely not brahmin-savarna.

this blog is ten years old today. it was worth the wait. 
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18/05/15

kerala: how caste surpassed class

by the time the land reform movement in kerala was finally translated into state policy, it had actually become a moment of 'caste surpassing class' and not vice versa. it was a movement when the most politically active jati group among the bahujans, especially sections of the ezhavas, forged a tentative alliance with the erstwhile landholding upper castes.. kerala history after that moment should perhaps be seen as a chronicle of the fortunes of this alliance as more space was negotiated, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, from the upper castes by this emerging dominant group, through time.. so what the policy achieved was actually only a formalization of of transfer of titles to peasants from this group who were already tilling the particular holdings as tenants.. land reforms across india have followed a similar pattern..they have always been transfer of full rights to a few jatis who were engaged as tenants earlier, not to the whole category of shudras or obcs or dalits, at large. these successful jatis form a minority within the shudra/obc category. this was the case in up, were the yadavs, kurmis, jats etc benefited to some extent, not all of the 70 odd obc jatis at large.. it's again, yadavs and kurmis etc in bihar, not the 130 other jatis..the dismantling of zamindaries and jagirdaries in coastal andhra and telangana benefited the reddy, kamma, kapu sub-castes.. and so on. the same was the case with kerala.. where the ezhavas and a couple of other jatis benefited more than the 70 other jatis..

so the class struggles, which had been waged earlier, finally transformed into a triumphal caste alliance when they became policy in the late 50s. all the progressive 'reform policies' in kerala should be seen as a culmination of a century old class struggles, wrongly referred to as mere caste -particularly in its reductive form, jati - assertion movements or religious reform struggles.. whether it was ayyankali's first agricultural strike or right to education movements, or the movements led by narayana guru and others - all of these can only only be understood as movements against caste or class rule. as dr. ambedkar had indicated in aoc, caste rule should be seen as constitutive of power derived derive from 'religion, status and property'. so the 1950s land reforms ensured some property for the ezhavas and a few others, while ensuring the maintenance of the religious authority, social status, property and power of the brahmins, nairs etc.. a strengthening of the caste order or caste rule through the the infusion of some new partner jatis into its fatigued body.

stagnation is a marker of agriculture in kerala more than in any other part of the country - it had arrived a decade or two earlier, in the 60s itself, while in many parts of the country it started in the eighties or nineties.. for instance, kerala now produces less rice than it did in the sixties, perhaps.. a large quantum of essential foodgrains come in from other states while large tracts of agricultural lands lie fallow.. this might all seem very strange, considering one would expect land reforms to increase productivity and output. in kerala, both have gone down over time.. if we analyse closely, we'll notice two subterranean facts: one, that land reforms actually arrived when a large number of the largest group of landholders - the nairs and brahmins - had already decided to consolidate their urban assets (and move away from agriculture?)..the nairs, for instance, had the highest literacy rates, perhaps, among all shudra groups in south india - right from telangana to tamil nadu - next only to the brahmins, even as early as 1911. two, the new group of tenants who had become title-holding farmers, the ezhavas and others, did not have a) the same resources as the erstwhile upper caste landholders to invest in increasing productivity, and b) a large number of these new farmers were themselves becoming more interested in urban jobs..

this caste alliance, which calls itself a communist party aiming for a 'people's democratic order' and working for the interests of the people against the 'landlord-bourgeois' dominated society represents the strongest class interest - or a combination of interests - in kerala.. it is characterized by what could be called babu collectivist interests - bureaucratic capitalists, as they would call in their terminology - plus a wide range of state-dependent commercial interests - from those involved in plantations to tourism to other such services. all of these interests share some common caste identities, and have a common vision.. we can perceive the peculiar contours of their vision by looking at the political economy they have together tried to forge in kerala over the last 6 decades - stagnation in agriculture, increase in consumption (among the middle classes, all fueled not by increased capital formation but by remittances generated from a workforce aiding economies elsewhere) without a concomitant increase in production, stagnation in industrial expansion, lots of disguised unemployment and underemployment. this represents the starkest case of what i call caste mode of production - selective adoption of modernity to fossilize social relations around caste through the agency of state power.

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08/02/09

anytime..anywhere

1.
anytime
anywhere
land's the problem
the problem's only land
a little land for food
or for your death
the problem's wholly land
nandigram mudigonda*
today's proper nouns
land's always the common noun
the blood tears spilled for land
eternal historic voyages
when it rains four drops
it's land
that splits into ten seeds
when ten tear drops are spilled
it's land
that flames up in a thousand angers

2.
july twenty eighth
caught in the mouth of the eagle of time
the chick
those who died
those who were wounded
behind the tragedies
carried as news
masked half-truths

3.
yes land's always a problem
those who wilted
in the sun, all season
their plea for shelter
is truly a law and order problem

4.
four of them, united, standing up for four feet of land
deserve, for that crime, to be shot
land to the limit of his padayatra
the one who claimed as his own
crossing nations
the one who gave up whole villages for adoption

the ruler's the same!

made to bear flags like sinners
or shot down like birds
under the ruler's hood
you find the same cunning!

those who lost
loved ones and land, their grief
that brings curses
is everywhere the same!

my translation of the telugu poem eppuDainA..ekkaDainA by narayanaswami, first published in andhra jyoti (august, 2007).
* mudigonda- refers to this incident.
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11/11/08

skirting the question of land

whether it's the government trying to acquire his land or some large businessman, why do you think an indian farmer would always be cheated? because he isn't as smart as you are?

because he's of an inferior variety of the human race?

that's one way of articulating the brown man's burden. here's another kind: one that rests on the principle that the indian farmer shall always cheat. so, you've to save the honest indian businessman or government from the wily indian farmer.
The land market in India is so primitive that very often both buyers and sellers depend on the Almighty and transact business. Around half the operational holdings in States is plagued by legal disputes, most of which are on account of ownership. Sub-division and fragmentation of land holdings is a common phenomenon arising out of excessive emphasis on heritage rights. There are also state-owned land which, either because of misuse or abuse of power by revenue authorities, have been encroached upon. The encroachers, in several cases, have been given titles by default. Though reforms were initiated, defective implementation of land records again led to conferment of titles to those who used them for their own purposes. Such land also got titles conferred over a period of time.
a fair transaction could happen when both - the buyer and the seller- have ready access to reliable information. when both of them have to depend on the almighty as the only source of reliable information- because there are no reliable records on land- how do you judge, later, who was cheated? or arrive at any conclusions, beforehand, who'd be cheated?

the whole debate on singur etc., provides so much fun. no one looks at the questions- where's the land? if there's land, where are the records? if there are no land records, how can there be a land market?

if you believe in the market, reliable land records would be the first step in ensuring that any given transaction would have a fair chance of being fair. you don't believe in the market? good. if you have reliable land records, you could redistribute the land on the basis of the records.

so, why is everyone, from the left and the right, who's talking about land (in singur or other such places), not talking about land, actually? because they all emerged from somewhere above brahma's ankles? because if you have reliable land records, you would have to redistribute the land on the basis of the records?
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22/10/08

the physics of disappearing land

going back to this post:
could it have been stolen? 44% and more of all cultivable land in india?
there must be some law of physics that says land can't disappear or be stolen. but look at how tough it is to find the land that's disappeared from most of our cities:
In 2001, office space near the center of town sold for $1 a square foot. Now it can go for $400 a square foot. Janwani bought his 6-acre plot in 1992 for $13,000. Today, even undeveloped, it's worth $3 million.

But high prices are only part of the problem for businesses looking for space in the city. It's nearly impossible to determine who actually owns any given piece of Bangalorean real estate. Some 85 percent of citizens occupy land illegally, according to Solomon Benjamin, a University of Toronto urban studies professor who specializes in Bangalore's real estate market. Most land in the city, as in the rest of India, is bound by ancestral ties that go back hundreds of years. Little undisputed documentation exists. Moreover, as families mingle and fracture over generations, ownership becomes diluted along with the bloodline. A buyer who wants to acquire a large parcel may have to negotiate with dozens of owners. Disputes are inevitable.

scott carney's great investigative work on the land mafia in bangalore could be easily read as a great investigative work on the land mafia in bangalore. please read the italicized portions again- the lessons we need to draw from it are not about the land mafia.
Some 40 percent of land transactions occur on the black market, according to Arun Kumar, an economist at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Often the local authorities facilitate these deals. A World Bank report rated the Bangalore Development Authority, which oversees urban planning, as one of the most corrupt and inefficient institutions in India.
and, from another page:
"When a foreign company wants to set up a business, they don't know who to trust," he says. "They need clear titles, and if they go to a local person, they're going to get screwed with legal cases. But if Rai gives you a title, it comes with a 100 percent guarantee of no litigation. No cheating. It's perfectly straightforward." [...]
According to a lawyer who deals with land issues, the system works like this: Asked to intercede by a prospective buyer, Rai checks out the parcel for competing owners. If two parties assert ownership, he hears both sides plead their case and decides which has the more legitimate claim (what he calls "80 percent legal"). He offers that person 50 percent of the land's current value in cash. To the other, he offers 25 percent to abandon their claim—still a fortune to most Indians, given the inflated price of Bangalorean real estate. Then he sells the land to his client for the market price and pockets the remaining 25 percent. Anyone who wants to dispute the judgment can take it up with him directly. [...]
Collusion between enforcers and mobsters raises troubling questions about the future of this city. "Since Bangalore went global, things have gotten worse," says Santosh Hegde , his graying hair dyed jet-black and a chain of prayer beads around his neck. He's the state official responsible for prosecuting corruption cases. "Businesspeople want to get things done quickly, and they have no option but to bribe officials to shortcut the bureaucracy," he says.Hegde, 68, served six years on India's Supreme Court before taking the anticorruption beat. He oversees a team of accountants who burrow through documents and field operatives trained in covert recordings and sting operations. Since assuming office, Hegde has charged more than 300 officials with receiving cash bribes totaling over $250,000 and illegal assets and land holdings worth $40 million. That's just 5 percent of total bribery in Karnataka, he says, which he estimates at more than $800 million.
no, it isn't about the land mafia, or about corruption or about fast paced development. and it isn't about bangalore or any other big city in india either.
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18/10/08

the case of the stolen land

a few days ago, i'd wandered into a discussion on singur (thanks to abi) at rahul siddharthan's blog. rahul had a few questions, and among them i found this one interesting:
Why didn't the Tatas (and others who extol the virtues of the free market) acquire their land on the open market?
yes, why didn't they go to the open market? that question represents insouciance of a degree, let's say, that's disturbing. if land was so freely available in the open market (or wherever), what the f&&* are the naxalites doing in the jungles? oh yes, of course, they don't have the money to buy the land. so why don't the more fortunate citizens of this country donate whatever little they can to a fund, say, the prime minister's relief fund, and ask the indian government to finance the naxalites?

that'd require a huge pile of money. how much? let's say there are 20 crore families in india and around 13 crore of them live in the villages. by most accounts, more than 40% of them are landless- say 5.2 crore families. even if the government paid only rs.1 lakh per acre it'd require 5,20,000 crores to buy up enough land to distribute at least one acre each to those 5.2 crore families. considering not even 13 lakh per acre was considered a fair rate in singur, you could say the government would need much more money to pay fair rates to the sellers. seems like a bad idea?

why doesn't the government just go ahead and mop up the excess land, instead? without paying any fair compensation? as of 1995-96, around 20% of land owners in rural india owned around 64% of all available agricultural land. and the landless represented around 43% of the rural population. you could say the top 20% of land owners had cornered all the landless poor's share of farmland (and more).

so, why didn't the government just mop up that excess land and distribute it among the landless? that is exactly what all progressive governments in india have been trying to do for the last sixty years- scouring the land for the land, which you and i know is easily available in the open market. but why can't the government find it?

could it have been stolen? 44% and more of all cultivable land in india?
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19/02/08

exhuming mumbai

over a million people live in dharavi, in an area spread over roughly 600 acres. roughly, again, you could say that each resident has access to around 3 sq.yds of living space. if you exclude the space occupied by such unnecessary frills as walls, roads etc., you'll realize there is not much space left for everyone to eat, shit, sit, play, dance, pace, make love, sleep, read, work, cook, fart, breathe, live in but just enough space to lie down and die, if you squeezed in your legs and your arms and pulled in your whole body together a little. yes, you can rest in peace in dharavi. roughly.

for the last thirty years, while the residents of dharavi and other slums in mumbai were doing just that, resting in peace, the governments of mumbai, maharashtra and india were engaged in furious, energetic efforts to ensure that no one eats, shits, sits, plays, dances, paces, makes love, sleeps, reads, works, cooks, farts, breathes, lives in over 34,000 acres of land in mumbai. not in peace, at least. now, suddenly the government has decided to give up its vigil- that powerful, progressive legislation designed to protect the poor from landlords always eager to hoard land in their tijoris and smuggle it abroad or even to the afterlife, the ulcra, has been scrapped:
After deferring this major reform measure from one Assembly session to another, the Maharashtra government today finally scrapped a law that controls urban land holdings, potentially freeing up large tracts in Mumbai for housing and construction and sending shares of property firms sharply higher.

Amidst slogan-shouting by Shiv Sena members, the resolution to repeal the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act of 1976, moved by Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, was passed by a voice vote in the state Assembly.
the report says the chief minister admitted that 'the Act has failed to serve the purpose'. it's quite obvious to every discerning citizen in mumbai by now that the 'Act has failed', but what was the original purpose of the act anyway?

truth isn't reality

the 34,000 acres weren't manufactured over the last thirty years- they were there in 1976 when the act was promulgated. and one of the purposes served by the act was to keep them vacant so that land elsewhere in mumbai became costlier and costlier- definitely out of the reach of the poor, out of the reach of those living in slums such as dharavi. and also out of the reach of most of the working classes. and those from the middle and the upper classes who could still afford to pay for it, paid several times more than they would have if those 34,000 and many more acres that had simply disappeared were available for sale.

many say dharavi isn't as large as 600 acres: it's only 175 hectares, or 430 acres. which means each resident has to squeeze himself tighter than i assumed ealier- his total access to space has declined by around a third in the space of a few lines of text. that's what legislation of the kind the urban land ceiling act represents- grand, arbitrary, idealistic, myopic, progressive, repressive, noble, inane, call it what you will, depending on your ideological tilt, your favourite bollywood heroine and your lucky number- ultimately ends up doing. distorting truth and reality, dividing them, rendering both meaningless. banishing them to the murky world of rumour, speculation, gossip, fantasy (read this, this and this to get as many estimates of the area, population, population density, slums, slumdwelling population in mumbai as three different citizens of mumbai can think up).

mumbai, as the wikipedia says, occupies 603 sq.kilometres (i've read elsewhere that it is spread over only 430 sq.kms or so- as i said, you're free to choose your reality here). which converts into around 1,49,000 acres. and the population of mumbai, again according to the wikipedia, was 13.3 million in 2006. which means the residents of dharavi, who constitute around 7.5% of mumbai's population, live on around 0.29% of the total land area in mumbai!

and it's not just dharavi, according to various estimates over half of mumbai lives in slums. one estimate says about 40% of the city's population lives in 3.5% of its area. in 1976, around the time the ulcra was brought in, bombay's population was about 5.9 million. the slumdwellers numbered 2.8 million. and common sense tells you, the available 'excess' or vacant land was probably much more than 34,000 acres. enough to accomodate all of the 2.8 million slumdwellers (in 1976) in some decent housing. and also enough to accommodate all of the 3-4 million additional influx of people into the slums since then. with more than enough land to spare for parks, roads, offices etc., and for future parks, roads etc. why didn't that happen?

the road to hell

the road to hell is paved with good intentions and is also dotted with grand obsessions, egoisms and vanities. instead of disappearing, slums in mumbai multiplied since 1976. what did disappear was one-third the land mass of the city- land that you could touch, feel and see everyday but... in the new reality, it didn't exist. it didn't exist for the slumdwellers whose number more than doubled, from 2.8 million in 1976 to around 6-7 million now. it didn't exist for the lakhs of migrants who still kept coming to mumbai and dharavi grew denser. and it didn't exist for all the homeseekers who paid at least 30% more, for the available land, than they'd have if the ulcra hadn't been promulgated. and the lawyers, builders, fixers, goons, politicians, babus, policemen, gangsters grew richer protecting, invading and trading in land that belonged to anyone, and also the land that suddenly belonged to no one, that had suddenly fallen off the map of the world.

how did this state sponsored deprivation work on the collective psyche of mumbai? and how did it affect india?
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