Taking ‘common’ out of land

The road to ownership

A contradiction

While the amendment to the PLPA has raised concerns about forest cover of the Aravalis being eroded further, it’s the misuse of the land consolidation law that has done irreversible damage to the hills, over several decades.Haryana has India’s lowest forest cover, but the little that it does is critical to sustain Delhi-NCR’s huge population by keeping the desert at bay and groundwater streams flowing. However, irreversible changes in the status of protected land have seen thousands of acres pass into private ownership and made any long-term conservation plan for Haryana virtually impossible.The immediate and most visible consequence of that is increased dust pollution in Delhi-NCR; in the coming years and decades, it will exacerbate and manifest as prominent signs of desertification.Privatisation of protected Aravali land has been going on since the 1970s. And while legal battles have been fought by land owners and conservationists for decades, a revelation last year that a private company had gained control of nearly 400 acres near Delhi led to calls in Parliament for the Haryana government to step in to protect the Aravalis and Delhi-NCR’s ecology.This caught the eye because of the size of the land parcel but there are scores of private individuals and entities who have, over the years, gained in a similar way from a process called ‘consolidation’. Like molecules rearranging themselves to form a new entity, pieces of disjointed land have morphed into numerous large land holdings all across the Aravali villages in south Haryana, primarily Gurugram and Faridabad, and passed into the hands of a few. This has been possible because of the legal ambiguity of Aravali laws, passage of ad-hoc rules, large-scale use of power of attorney and a general procedural mist that allows manipulation of the process.Aided by an enabling system, people made hay. Most of the land that has passed into private ownership came from pools of land that a village had common ownership over. In the land records, this was known as ‘shamlat deh’ (land that belongs to the community), and therefore, could not be sold or carved into smaller plots. The ownership of this common land was with the village panchayat.The floodgates to privatisation opened in the 1970s when the Haryana government transferred the ownership of ‘shamlat’ land to the ‘community’ from the panchayat. As a result, every villager with an agricultural holding got a piece of ‘shamlat’ land that was equivalent to the agricultural holding. The government did this under provisions of the East Punjab Holding Consolidation and Prevention of Fragmentation Act, 1948.This law allows consolidation of land to increase agricultural productivity. However, in most villages, the land type of ‘shamlat deh’ was primarily ‘gair mumkin pahar’ (uncultivable hill), and hence, served no agricultural purpose. And even though villagers received a joint undivided share, they began looking for buyers for their individual shares. Since it was the kind of land that was attractive to real estate, many investors from Delhi and UP rushed to buy what they could.‘Gair mumkin pahar’ gradually began passing into private hands. “There are many stories on how villagers sold off their land to investors back in the 1970s and 1980s. Rich people were keen to invest without even looking at the exact plot in the Aravalis. For villagers, it was easy money,” said activist Sunil Harsana, a resident of Mangar village.Describing consolidation as a tool to carry out plotting in the Aravalis, an IAS officer, now retired, who served as director-general (consolidation) in Haryana, said, “The sole purpose of consolidation in the Aravalis was to privatise the land since there was no way agricultural productivity could be increased in uncultivable land. Consolidation was deliberately carried out so the hills could be plotted and private ownership could be given. This has been done with the involvement of some revenue department officials and in violation of several Supreme Court orders. It has not only led to degradation of the Aravalis, but has also taken away common land from villagers, which could have been used for community infrastructure.”Col SS Oberoi (retd), an environment activist who moved the NGT against a consolidation order in Kot (Faridabad) and Roz Ka Gujjar (Sohna) villages in 2014, explained why consolidation was a questionable move. “Using the consolidation Act to create plots in the ‘shamlat’ land was sheer misuse of the Act in at least three ways. One, the land is not agricultural. Two, there are no fragments to consolidate. Three, they are either recorded forests or deemed forests under the Godavarman judgment of the Supreme Court.”A senior government official, however, said consolidation was done only to help farmers. “Only land under agriculture has been consolidated in the villages, with a sole purpose to help farmers. However, we have taken action whenever we received any objections from villagers. The process has been completed in more than 6,000 villages in the state,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.Once the land ownership shifted from the panchayat to the community, the next step was to get plots demarcated because farming wasn’t the objective of the land owners here: making money from the plots was. As a result, a process called ‘chakbandi’ was initiated for plots to be created and registered. “Having an undivided share in the Aravali hills was certainly not helping land owners. Therefore, plotting was done. At this stage, a lot of norms were violated and the consolidation process was carried out to favour a few land owners,” said advocate (land revenue) Arjun Singh.Sources said among the first places where chakbandi happened in south Haryana was Mangar, in the mid-80s. In several villages, chakbandi has been completed. In many, it hasn’t been done yet. The process mandates that before chakbandi happens in a village, a communiqué by the respective district administration has to be issued to notify that the consolidation exercise will be carried out. A consolidation committee is formed by the consolidation officer after this. It comprises 10 villagers, including the sarpanch, members of the gram sabha, nambardar, patwari and tehsildar and revenue department officials. The committee gives advice to consolidation officers and informs villagers about the share of land they would get as a result of chakbandi and the share that needs to be set aside for common infrastructure like a school, an official said.“In reality, these norms and legal processes are often ignored. The consolidation committees are made only on paper. No communique is issued,” said Kesar Singh, husband of the Kot sarpanch who raised objections publicly about consolidation of land there to favour a large company. “Once the hills are partitioned, land owners get demarcation done with help of patwaris. They also carry out construction, which is banned,” admitted a senior officer in the revenue department.Construction is banned because the land is protected under sections 4&5 of the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA), which was amended by the Haryana assembly last year to exclude vast tracts from protected status. When the law is notified, PLPA will be lifted from all of Gurgaon — which has lost maximum forest cover in the last 10 years, according to the latest Forest Survey of India report — and Faridabad. There are 38 villages in Gurgaon and around 17 in Faridabad, which have PLPA-notified land.One can see the impact of this in the large number of farmhouses and banquet halls that have mushroomed in south Haryana, on ‘shamlat’ land. Panchayats, as a result, don’t have land that could be used for building schools, community centres, etc. “I filed a case against consolidation in Kot because once it is happens, it goes into private hands. We will be left with no land for schools, hospitals, etc. The village doesn’t have any common land to establish a middle school. Right now, children from the village have to travel 5km to attend a middle school,” said Kesar Singh of Kot.A widely used tool by land owners and brokers to trade their land holding is the power of attorney (PoA). It is particularly useful for those who are looking for bigger land, like real estate investors and companies, because hundreds of small, contiguous land holdings can be transferred to one entity using the PoA. “Since registry of ‘shamlat’ land is restricted in Haryana now, PoA is used as a tool to transfer rights. If a PoA holder has been given a right to transfer land, s/he can do as soon as registry is opened. This has helped many big businesses create large land holdings,” said Rajbir Singh, an advocate.While activists accuse government officials of collusion in letting Aravali land pass into private hands, in Gurgaon, the municipal corporation has been engaged in a long legal battle to reclaim it in Gwalpahari, where the current land owners bought plots before the formation of MCG. The civic body claims village common land has to be given back to the corporation for development work and community activities. “The privatisation of the hills has complicated things for MCG in villages taken over by it. Those who bought the land are not ready to give it up. So, the corporation either has to give hefty compensation to land owners or give up its claim,” said advocate Sudhir Jha.The privatisation process, activists say, has also violated several Supreme Court orders. In 2011, in the Jaspal Singh judgment, the Supreme Court stated that common land shouldn’t be privatised and ownership of village common land should be given back to panchayats across the country. In 2014, when consolidation orders for Kot and Roz Ka Gujjar village were challenged in the NGT, the state government in an affidavit withdrew the consolidation order. But it hasn’t been revoked in other villages. Besides, registration of shamlat land was banned by the development and panchayats department in 2012, but TOI found sale deeds and PoAs for such land being registered even in 2019.