[NYTr] India's Peasants Protest for Land Rights

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Steven Robinson - activ-l

The New York Times - Oct 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/world/asia/29india.html


India's Peasants Protest for Land Rights

By Saher Mahmood and Somini Sengupta

New Delhi - From a village in Madhya Pradesh, State, in the heart of
India, Gudiya Bai came here walking because, she said, she had lost her
land to a limestone mine. From eastern Orissa, Johny Bilyung came
because most of his tiny plot had been taken over for the construction
of a dam. And from neighboring Jharkhand, Budhua Tanabhagat came
because he had yet to get water from a dam that cost him half of his
fields.

For 26 days, thousands of peasants like these have marched more than 200
miles here to the capital from Gwalior, in central India, with the hope
of telling their government how they had been cast aside by India's
roaring economic growth. They arrived Sunday morning in an orderly,
peaceful three-mile-long procession. Most of them wore plastic
flip-flops, and some said they were already on their third pair.

A spokesman for Ekta Parishad, or Unity Council, which organized the
march, said it had registered 25,000 participants. The council
mobilizes people, particularly the "poor and deprived," to seek "proper
and just" use of land and other resources.

The marchers' principal grievance was over land, and their presence in
the capital was a stark reminder of one of India's biggest challenges
as it seeks to balance the needs of a vulnerable countryside with the
demands of economic expansion.

More than half of the population makes its living from agriculture, and
most peasants subsist on tiny plots fed by fickle rains. While
industrial and public works projects displaced people in past decades,
the pace of industrialization has accelerated significantly in recent
years, sharpening competition over land, one of India's most coveted
resources.

Peasants' protests, some of them violent, have delayed several proposed
projects - including steel mills, power plants and Chinese-style Special
Economic Zones - postponing several billion dollars in investments in
the past two years. The government has been compelled to revisit its
Special Economic Zone policy, which gives developers generous tax
breaks, and is writing a policy to compensate those whose lands and
livelihoods are lost.

The peasant procession, which began in Gwalior, in the middle of India,
brought some of the most destitute Indians here to the richest city in
the land. They carried sacks over their shoulders, containing a few
clothes, a steel plate and cup, and thin quilts for warmth at night.
Some carried umbrellas to shield themselves from the still-hot midday
sun. Three marchers were killed last week, hit by a speeding truck
along the road in neighboring Uttar Pradesh State.

Many marchers are indigenous people known here as tribals and among the
most vulnerable to displacement by industrial projects slated for the
heavily forested, resource-rich swath in central India.

They were joined by a fair number of foreigners. The cost of the
procession, about $1.25 per person per day, the organizers said, was
defrayed by foreign aid agencies.

The marchers' demands included enforceable property deeds and fast-track
courts to settle land disputes, which can take several years. "Land.
Water. Forest," read a banner strung on a jeep that led the procession.

Gudiya Bai, from a village called Jhiraha, said her extended family had
lost half of its 10 acres to a limestone mine. What was left became
infertile. She blames the mine for making water scarce, a contention
that could not be verified. As their household income dwindled, one by
one, family members went to work in the mine. Today, it employs six of
her eight children, all but one of whom are under 14, the legal working
age in India.