On the Future of Indigenous Traditions - Munin

With regard to the categories of the Adivasis lands taken from these (revenue) 67
villages that have gone into making of these industrial estates are not present here,
however. This was just simply to demonstrate the scale in which the acquisition could
evict and dispossess people who own it for no or very little in return. In Jharkhand
most of the Adivasis from either of the groups would have inherited their ancestral
lands, unless they have fully mortgaged it or left it completely for reasons of it not
being cultivatable or other reasons. In the above cases, if we could find case studies
done on them, which is not very likely, there would be many examples.
In fact the acquisition of land in India and other immovable properties are mostly
acquired under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (as amended in 1984). “This law
was not enacted with the resettlement in view. It was enacted in the nineteenth
century when the maintenance of law and order, and not development, was the main
focus of colonial government administration” says, Hari Mohan Mathur in his book
‘Managing Resettlement in India’. Mathur who is a development management and
resettlement specialist worked in government also remarks that resettlement was not
the issue that it is today when this law was promulgated. This ‘archaic law’, still in
force, however is inadequate to meet the problems that people now face due to loss of
their lands for dams… thermal power stations, mining operations, and other similar
developmental projects, making reference to Sukumar Das’s essay. 68
2.7.2. Case illustration: Peraj East Open Cast mining project and
displacement
What is it like for an Adivasi to be evicted, uprooted, or in milder words ‘displaced’
from his /her ancestral land and its surrounding for certain projects -mining, dam, or
other industries? Once evicted, the slang used among the local people for a displaced
person is ‘uthlu’ in the Hazaribag area, a term to express a sense for those having lost
their very ground or social base of their identity to be part of a larger society. But how
the Adivasis themselves feel about it, and why they feel so, could be seen from one of
67 Revenue village is an administrative unit of a village with several helmets and its different categories
of land around the village and its several helmets. Each family could have five to twenty acres of lands.
68 Hari Mohan Mathur, Managing Resettlement in India (New Delhi:Oxford University Press, 2006), 8
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