Being Landless In Mangaon, Maharashtra

Ensuring that people have access to livelihood opportunities has been a central concern for the development sector and a lot has been written and spoken about it in the past. Livelihood plays an integral role in everybody’s life. Let’s begin by understanding the meaning of livelihood.

Livelihood?is defined as ‘the capabilities, assets and activities that people require for a means of living.’ In simple terms, the meaning of livelihood is to secure the necessities of life. Words like means of support, sustenance, daily bread are all synonyms to the word livelihood. All across India people are involved in a variety of livelihood practices. In this article, we would be reading about the Katkari tribals of Raigad region, located in Maharashtra.

The Katkaris are one of the most marginalized communities of India, being designated as ‘Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) ’ within the Scheduled Tribes. Located in pockets in Gujarat and Maharashtra, a substantial population (approx. 1,10,000) is spread across all of Raigad towns, in places like Pen, Khopoli, Rees, Mangaon, Mahad, and Alibag. Katkaris dwelled in the forests, lived off it and didn’t own land unlike other communities. They would move from forest to forest and became protectors of it.

They worshiped the forest, the sun and the moon as their Gods. The folk songs that they sing or the tunes they dance to was all in reverence of the mighty forest. It was their provider and they were its protectors. As time passed by, the tribals were denied their right to the land as a result of the colonial forest laws in India.

After the Forest Rights Act 2006 , the Scheduled Tribes and other ‘Traditional Forest Dwellers’ were provided the restitution of deprived forest rights across India including both individual rights to cultivated land in forestland and community rights over common property resources. Even after passing this law almost a decade back, its execution has taken several years.

The current situation in most of the villages in the district of Raigad is that the process of granting land in the name of the farmers is still on going. In the villages that have received the forest land, referred to as ‘Dali Land’, the distribution of land still remains undone. As a result no one individual can claim authority on the land. This state of affairs makes the Katkari tribals of Raigad to be landless. All across India several communities are still landless and among them the worst affected are the tribals.

The Katkari tribe (Courtesy Centre For Social Action website)

In 2015, the then finance minister of India Mr. Arun Jaitley had said 300 million people do not own land. The draft national land reforms policy released in July 2013 said 31% of all households are landless. That number is derived from a 2003-04 survey of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) , but the definition of landless is unclear.

According to NSSO, landlessness is defined as possessing land below 0.002 hectares, or 215 sq. ft. A 2008 paper by?Vikas Rawal ?of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, claimed that 41.63% of rural households were landless. That works out to 61.5 million households and 307 million people in rural India alone.

Ownership of land is critical as it affects income, social security, health, education etc. However, for decades, there has hardly been any attempt to bring in land reforms in India. When you search for Landlessness on Google and read articles on it, majority of them have mentioned the movie Do Bigha Zamin , an old classic. The movie dates back to the year 1953 where the protagonist of the film loses his land to a Zamindar who is going to construct a mill on that same land. Almost 70 years later, landlessness is still an unfortunate reality in India. The Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011 , which acknowledged and counted landlessness as a major indicator of poverty, put the ‘households with no land’ at 56.41 percent of total rural households or 101 million households.

The landless poor are India’s growing problem. The bulk of poverty in India is found among those with no land or insufficient land with which to feed themselves. This is the hidden yet harsh reality and unfortunately to an extent it is invisible.

The repercussions of being a part of the landless poor in India are several. Since land assures an individual of identity and dignity and creates condition and opportunities for realizing social equality, assured possession and equitable distribution of land is a lasting source for peace and prosperity and paves the way for economic and social justice in India.

In a casual conversation, I spoke to Suvarna Tai who?resides in Paned Wadi (village) in Pen block. The house where she lives in has been constructed by her family under the government scheme of Indira Awas Yojana. It is a small hut made with haystacks, mud and bricks. Her village has been allotted the land under the Forest Rights Act 2006 but they are still awaiting the visit of the Talathi to come, measure the land and give each household their designated space. Surprisingly, she says it doesn’t bother her family much as they have never felt what owning?land means. She happily took me to the area where she would be getting a?part of the land. On being asked how she would utilise the land, her wish was to grow vegetables, turmeric etc. to sell in the local market. Currently she works on the land of the Marathas in the neighbouring village as a daily wage labourer.

Poster of the 1953 movie that won the best film and best director (Bimal Roy) Filmfare awards. The plot of the movie was based on a Zamindar threatening to seize two acres of land owned by a humble family if they fail to repay their debts. The father of the family then works as a rickshaw puller in Kolkata to earn money.

The vicious cycle of being a daily wage labourer has become a norm amongst the Katkaris. Majority of them work on brick kiln sites where they are often exploited and made to work as bonded labourers. The second most common form of livelihood is to lease agricultural land or work on the land of the Maratha community. During the pre monsoon period, men and women depend on the forest produce which they sell in the local market. A few areas that share proximity to a water body engage in fishing.

Some tribal people have expressed their desire to take loans and are willing to invest in small businesses and ventures like purchasing machinery for cashew processing, goat rearing, fish breeding, or fabrication work. Those who have learnt a few technical or vocational trades have taken up jobs outside the village, but seldom have they been able to persevere in their jobs as they express that they miss their family, village and cultural traditions and celebrations.

They don’t feel comfortable to work together as a group and would rather take up any livelihood initiative individually. They look for instant ways of earning money hence they take loans from brick kiln owners and then land up working on their brick kilns in order to repay them (a subtle kind of bonded labour). They are only seasonally engaged in agricultural labour, and in other months they work as domestic workers or as helpers in small industries (10-12%). Some tribals rear goats and sell them during the festive seasons.

The crux of the matter is that there is no fixed source of income that they can depend on. Due to these irregularities and lack of availability of livelihood options majority of them migrate for about 6-7 months in a year i.e from October to March.?

Land is the most valuable possession from which people can receive permanent means of livelihood. Absence of which may lead to another societal problem like migration as mentioned above.?Migration has reduced over the years, however those who are still caught in the bonded labour trap still migrate for a few months. 35% of the families in a village migrate after the agricultural season and most of them mainly as per the availability of jobs during the brick kiln season and also because many of them have taken loans which they have to repay, hence most work as bonded labourers.

Another aspect in which migration negatively affects their society is the rise in the number of children dropping out of school. When a family decides to migrate, its not just the man and woman who migrate but also take their children with them as additional hands to earn income.

The root cause of migration was unavailability of enough livelihood options for them. Centre For Social Action , a non profit working in the region where I am placed as an India Fellow , acted upon this and created a setup to tackle the problem. We started with training five Self Help Groups on various products like Nachi Laddoo, Nachni Papad, Methi Laddu, Bombay Duck Chutney etc. As Nachni is grown in abundance the SHG’s decided to make products out of that. For the making of the products the SHGs come to the centre i.e our local partner NGO’s place.

Once the products are made they are sold in Mumbai. The aim of this initiative is to give them at least two weeks of employment and once this stream of income is regular we hope they wouldn’t migrate in November. Here our focus was not only generating livelihood but also to inculcate the idea of ownership and most importantly entrepreneurship.?

After a couple of months of this initiative on livelihoods, we planned an exposure visit to Ahwa in Gujarat. The women from the SHG were invited to experience the work of tribal women from Gujarat. The women there ran a bakery producing Nachni biscuits, they had established a hotel, some of them owned rice, papad machines and mill. It was a three day exposure visit with a lot of conversations and observations. The tribal women of Gujarat were independently running all the businesses. After the day’s visit we would all sit down and share what we felt that day. All the fifteen of us had a striking observation to make.

They said that all of them owned the land they were working on, whether it was the bakery, the mill, the land for the poultry farm etc. Since they owned the land they had built spaces which they used for running their own. They set up the place themselves, they decided the timings they wanted to work for etc. One of the SHG members named Alka Tai wished to open a bakery of her own in Mahad.

Her only dilemma was the fact that she didn’t own a piece of land where she could start her business from. I asked if she could rent a place instead, to which she replied that no one trusts us Katkaris, I will never be able to run my own business.

After all these discussions I realised how important it is to own a land. It does not just give you confidence but also builds the identity of an individual. It can also bring about a sense of ownership in people. When the SHG’s are trained in making various products, the first motive is to bring about a sense of ownership in them and also hope that they realise that it is their own business. Several videos and sessions are presented to try and inculcate this approach. However after the exposure visit to Gujarat I realised how the real sense of ownership will only come once the place belongs to them.

Currently the members of the SHG across Raigad have to come to the partner NGO’s workplace for production. Since the place doesn’t belong to them, they are bound to be under the partner’s supervision. I believe until and unless they establish a place of their own where they make rules of their own, decided their timings etc, the need for showcasing ownership will always arise.

Being landless not only hampers with their sense of identity but makes practising other livelihood options also difficult.?We wanted to introduce Beekeeping as a form of livelihood activity. While speaking to one of the organisations who provide trainings in beekeeping, they mentioned that they don’t work with landless people. They elaborated that results from beekeeping is the most effective when the surroundings have adequate flora or an agricultural land. The bees will then enhance the quality of the yield as well as an increase in the output of honey. Given these circumstances this option of livelihood did not seem feasible for the tribals as they still await the distribution of individual land.

Another such instance took place last year where we tried to practice growing exotic vegetables owing to its great demand. An exposure visit to Pune was organised to learn the techniques, skill, use of equipment etc. One person out of the six who went showed interest in trying this in his village near Khopoli. Since he doesn’t own the land he knew of a barren piece of land near his village and went along with the social worker to speak to the woman who owned the land.

Unfortunately the woman told the social worker that she doesn’t trust a tribal and refused to lease the land to him. Several such stories of disappointment have time and again surfaced. Whenever an individual was willing to take a risk, the unavailability of land always set him back and he had no other choice left but to go back to being a daily wage labourer. The fact that a very high number of deprived households are also landless doing casual manual labour is significant. Land being the most important asset in rural India, its absence with other deprivations means a household has no asset and it is that much more vulnerable.

Owning land is not the only factor, which influences the options of one’s livelihood. There are various factors that are responsible for the livelihood of a person including education, skills, networking, infrastructure, financial capital etc. All these factors are interlinked with each other and make the basis of a sustainable livelihood.

However in the case of the Katkari tribals of Raigad, landlessness has been a major concern for years. In fact In 2009, the rural development ministry’s?Committee on State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms?pointed out that landlessness had witnessed a phenomenal rise from about 40 percent in 1991 to about 52 percent in 2004-5.

It explained why: “While all the enhanced landlessness cannot be attributed to the liberalisation process alone the non-agricultural demands placed on land on account of industrialisation, infrastructural development, urbanisation have certainly contributed to the process.”

As of today the focus of our partner NGOs is to get the Dali land for each village in the Raigad district. This would be the first step towards their economic development. In the coming years my hope is that they receive the land which is rightfully theirs and are able to built their life from it. Till then the focus is on finding alternate sources of livelihood which require no possession of land like tailoring classes, producing food products etc. The goal is that Suvarna Tai and Alka Tai’s of Raigad who are willing to start their own business and have an entrepreneurial mindset.

Once this cycle?starts, and hopefully majority of them will be engaged in livelihood practices that give them a steady source of income and most importantly dignified work, the next generation will not fall in the trap of bonded labour.

About the author: Aditi Sah is an India Fellow (2018) who was placed with Centre For Social Action in Raigad, Maharashtra as a part of her fellowship. Her role at CSA was to strengthen and support the formation and functioning of livelihood co-operative of tribal people. Before India Fellow, Aditi had worked for two years in Public Relations (PR) after pursuing Bachelors in Mass Media (BMM) from Jai Hind College, Mumbai. She is now working with SEWA Bharat.