Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Women in Pastoralist and Shifting Cultivation Communities 49
The Forest Department stated openly that this land was ‘voluntarily’
handed over by the people and that through the JFM they were able to successfully
reclaim 37,000 hectares of encroached land in the Vishakapatnam
circle. This was ostensibly because people had happily gone in for bhoodhan
(gifting of land) and returned it to the Forest Department. The protests
by some NGOs against such eviction and their arguing for a rehabilitation
and resettlement package for the adivasis did not address the real
issue: settling all outstanding adivasi claims on forests and giving them
legal recognition to podu. The demand for rehabilitation was happily
accepted by the World Bank, who upped their next instalment of funding
to the tune of US$ 108 million for the forestry project, this time under the
name of Community Forest Management (CFM). It must be noted that
the rehabilitation and resettlement policy under CFM, officially announced
through a government order, reinforces the state’s fundamental
opposition to both shifting cultivation and settling the outstanding claims
on the forests:
It was generally felt that shifting cultivation and the encroachment into
the forest for cultivation are not good practices and they need to be discouraged.
The shifting cultivators and encroachers into the forest should
be motivated to leave the practice and surrender lands encroached upon
for cultivation. (Government Order MS 10)
The complete hollowness of the so-called voluntarily participation,
the horrific ramifications it had on women, as also the central role of women
in leading the resistance to the state’s taking over their land came to light
when podu farmers organised under the leadership of adivasi movements
in Andhra. This was as part of the wider response of adivasi and other
forest-dwellers’ movements against the most recent attempt to evict the
so-called ‘encroachers’ 5 (Andhra Pradesh Adivasi Aikya Vedika and Yakshi
2004; Campaign for Survival and Dignity 2003). The testimonies of
adivasis and other forest-dwellers brought to light the subtle and not-so
subtle state violence, as also the manner in which the state, through the
agency of the VSS, is using the local village elite to perpetrate violence and
do the policing. It also brought to light the forms of resistance used by
women.
Women Podu Cultivators Fight for their Right to Practise Podu:
Pallamguda village (Gannela Panchayat, Araku Valley, Visakhapatnam