Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Restructuring the Employment Guarantee Scheme 151
negative perception of the land. They felt that such rocky land would be
of no use for any plantation. Making trenches by digging was not possible
without blasting. They asserted that the wasteland around the village was
so hilly that they would not be able to climb it and would be unable to do
any work there.
Already some of us have encroached upon the gairan, but the titles have
not been given to us by the government. We are fighting for that. We cultivated
the land for two years and both the years the high caste farmers
allowed their cattle to graze in our plots and all our investment and labour
went waste.
The high caste farmers in the village are opposed to the idea of allotting
the gairan plots to the Dalit landless labourers. They are afraid that once
we have our own land we would bargain for better wages when we work
on their farms.
We need to first secure the gairan plots in our own names and then we
can think of horticulture as an option.
If you are supporting our demand for the distribution of gairan to the
landless, then we are happy to work with you. We would think that you
would compliment our movement of Jameen Adhikar Andolan.
It is possible that tomorrow our fruits too would be stolen under the
pretext that it is a common land.
Gairan is usually wasteland, a little rocky plot, and it would be quite difficult
for us to dig trenches for the tree plantation. We may not afford to
pay for digging work.
That is not true. Some of us go on Employment Guarantee Scheme and
have done work on rocky land. It is not more difficult than that. Our men
folk too would help us to dig.
On the Availability of Water
The next point of discussion concerned the availability of water. We had
made posters based on the evaluation report and our interviews with the
nine orchard owners. We made the point that while water was a crucial
resource for any land-based activity, the amount of water required was