Communities, Commons and Corporations
by Perspectives (New Delhi: Perspectives), 2012; pp 164,Rs 100.
My review of this book appeared in the Oct 13, 2012 issue of the Economic & Political Weekly. The text is reproduced below.
Privatising the Commons
Several hundred million people across rural India depend on the commons – natural resources such as forests, pastureland, “wasteland”, coasts, lakes and rivers that are shared by the community – for their livelihoods. These livelihoods are under threat with the state handing over these resources at an accelerating pace to corporations for industrial or commercial use. How has it come to be that communities have no legal rights over the natural resources they have used for generations? How does the state justify privatising these commons? How are communities reacting to this challenge to their lives and livelihoods? These and related questions drive the subject matter of the book under review.Communities, Commons and Corporations is authored by Perspectives, a group of students and teachers from Delhi’s universities. The group declares in its programme that its task is to “document the lives and struggles of people on the margins of law and society”. Perspectives has produced a few other works of such documentation in the past. Its earliest work, Abandoned: Development and Displacement,
dates to 2007 and has been reviewed in this weekly.
The methodology used for the present work is a combination of field visits – to “sites of change, conflict and crisis” to “understand issues and situations ‘firsthand, on the ground’” – and research based on secondary sources. The book begins with a detailed first person account of observations made during two field visits to communities who largely depend on natural resources over which they have no property rights
– a forest community in Harda, Madhya Pradesh and a fishing community in coastal Kutch, Gujarat. This is followed by essays on the enclosure of the commons and the consequent displacement of communities in colonial and present day India. The latter part of the book critically analyses the laws and policies that govern the appropriation of the commons today and interrogates the economic development that is taking place.
What Are the ‘Commons’?
Bringing clarity to the notion of the “commons” is crucial for a work of this nature. Perspectives explains that the “commons”, in its view, are natural resources customarily used by communities over generations to support their livelihood. Forests populated by tribal communities, coasts, coastal waters and lakes used by fisher folk, and pastureland and rivers sustaining villages are all part of the commons. The use rights of a community over some part of the commons may or may not be recognised by the state. Even where it recognises community use rights, the state considers itself to be the owner of the resource with the right to change the pattern of its use anytime. An example of the latter are the gauchar (grazing) lands in Kutch
that Perspectives finds are vested with the panchayats, though legal ownership is with the state.
Any defence of communities living off the commons requires one to counter the view propagated by the administration, and often accepted uncritically, that these communities are “encroaching on public property”. There is a need to explain how these communities have come to be without rights over resources crucial to their survival in a world dominated by private property. Perspectives examines colonial history to provide an
answer along these lines.
Who Is the ‘Encroacher’?
Commercial interest – the sole objective of maximising revenue – informed the colonial attitude to different communities and natural resources. Settled agriculture was encouraged, for revenue could be collected from land under cultivation. The needs of efficient collection – making individuals responsible for revenue and forcing mortgage or sale of their land for recovery of dues, among others – led the colonial state to
institutionalise private ownership of cultivated land and maintain the record of ownership.
On the other hand, nomadic and semi nomadic livelihoods that depended largely on forests and pastures were discouraged, for they were difficult to tax and yielded little revenue. Ignoring the legal rights of forest, fishing and pastoral communities deriving from custom and tradition, the colonial state assumed ownership of all land and other natural resources except land under cultivation from which it derived revenue.
Forests were exploited for revenue through commercial forestry after restricting the use rights of forest communities. Village commons were made to yield revenue by bringing them under cultivation. The legal regime established by the colonial state divided natural resources neatly into “privately owned” and “state owned”. It had no place for community ownership or management of resources.
Moving to the present, Perspectives notes that the injustices meted out to communities dependent on forests and other commons in colonial times were never reversed. The continuation of institutions like the forest department, laws governing land acquisition, and forests and policies towards “wasteland” from colonial times reflects the continuity in the outlook of the contemporary Indian state towards people dependent
on the commons.
This outlook comes to the fore wherever resistance is offered by a community to appropriation by the state.
While reading this book, this reviewer came across another instance of the forcible eviction of a community from the commons. The community in question was of traditional fisher folk who had been living in floating huts on the large Loktak Lake in Manipur for generations. The state chief minister reportedly termed them “encroachers” and justified their eviction as necessary for the “development” of the lake.
The Geography of Privatisation
While there
has been continuity in the way the State views communities using the commons
from colonial times to the present, the pattern of appropriation has changed in
keeping with the changes in the economy.
In the
colonial period, the state assumed legal ownership of the commons. Communities
were however allowed its use as long as this did not come in the way of the
State deriving revenue, wherever such possibility existed. Republican India saw
large scale enclosure of the commons and displacement of people by large dams
and other industrial projects promoted by the state. The last two decades have
seen a major change in the pattern of appropriation, with the commons now being
transferred to private corporations.
Corporations,
Perspectives observes, pose a threat to communities dependent on the commons in
two ways (p 86):
“by
directly appropriating the land, water and forests on which they are dependent
or by polluting these resources in a manner that their capacity to generate
livelihoods is diminished or exhausted.”
Perspectives draws attention to certain
geographical areas where the privatization of the commons is taking place at a
rapid rate.
In the
Himalayan states – Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim
– where the availability of agricultural land is low making forests and
pastures extremely important for livelihood, dozens of ‘run-of-the-river’ hydro
projects are coming up on the principal rivers.
The mineral
rich areas of central and eastern India West Bengal are densely forested and home to a
large tribal population. Today, there is a major push to open new mines and
coal blocks under the most pristine forests have already been allocated to
various corporations. Scores of thermal power plants are also under
construction in these states, clustered near coal reserves and water sources.
A third
geography that is being privatized rapidly is India
These are
of course not the only regions or causes figuring in the take over of the
commons. Most cases of land acquisition across the country involve some common
land. Perspectives cites the example of the POSCO steel plant which
requires 4004 acres of land, of which only 438 acres are privately owned. The
government land, most of it classified as ‘forest’ land, has been used for
betel vine cultivation by local villagers for generations.
The
impotency of law
There are laws
to protect the commons such as the Environment Protection Act (EPA). Then there
are laws of fairly recent origin aimed at recognizing the rights of traditional
users of the commons such as the Forest Rights Act (FRA). How do these laws
measure up against their stated purpose?
Any impact
on the environment is clearly of great concern to communities surviving on the
commons, affecting as it often does, larger numbers than the enclosure of the
commons itself. The EPA requires an Environment Impact Assessment as a
precondition for most projects. The EIA process is considered the mainstay of
the state’s effort to protect the environment. In a detailed assessment of the
EIA process, Perspectives points to its many flaws including the most basic,
the hollowness of the high sounding ‘public consultation’. The public affected
by a project can at best voice its opinion at a ‘public hearing’ but has no
powers to stop the project or even to set preconditions.
An
excellent essay that forms the opening chapter of the book details the struggle
for livelihood of Harda villagers and assesses the impact of measures such as
the Joint Forest Management initiative and the Forest Rights Act. Perspectives
finds that Joint Forest Management – a two decade old policy initiative,
intended to get the cooperation of forest dwellers in achieving forest
department objectives while at the same time providing avenues for them to
improve their income – has not brought any positive change to the forest
communities. The distribution of land titles under the FRA has barely
progressed, with a paltry 3000 pattas issued to forest dwellers (tribal
and non-tribal included) in Harda district, two years into the program, when
just the tribal population of the district numbers 1.2 lakhs.
Why have
the FRA and the JFM policy failed to bring any improvement to the ground
situation of the forest dwellers? Perspectives rightly locates these failures
in the highly asymmetric power structure that exists in the forest areas. The
forest department has been responsible for guarding the forests from ‘encroachment’
for a hundred and fifty years, and in the process, accumulated immense powers
over the forest dwellers. It will obviously resist any dilution of its powers –
as will happen if forest dwellers are granted rights over forest land. The blatant
abuse of power by the Forest Department and the Police in districts such as
Harda has attracted the attention of the Supreme Court which recently ordered the state to set up a district level grievance redressal authority.
Perspectives
concludes that legislations and policies will not prevent the appropriation of
the commons and dispossession of the people under the current dispensation. “They
will either be circumvented, or violated, or poorly implemented, or will
actively facilitate this dispossession” (p 96)
The last
portion of the book interrogates ‘growth’ and critiques the current pattern of
development. It argues that economic growth today is strongly linked to the
handover of natural resources to corporations. The ability of this type of
development to generate secure jobs is questionable; however it is certainly
leading to large scale destruction of traditional occupations and existing
livelihoods. It concludes that this growth is not just ‘non-inclusive’, but actually
comes at the cost of the most disadvantaged sections, creating poverty and
worsening inequality.
(Copies of the book can be obtained from Sharmin Khodaiji, c/o D-1, Staff Quarters, Hindu College, Delhi University, Delhi 110007)
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