Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

50 SAGARI R. RAMDAS AND NITYA S. GHOTGE
district, Andhra Pradesh) consists of 37 households of Paringi Poraja
(a ‘primitive’ tribal group), Goud and Valmiki. The following is the testimony
of Ms Gobbu Mitti, a podu farmer of Pallamguda:
We were 25 families doing podu in the forests. In 1994, the Forest Department
officials visited the village and urged us to establish a VSS committee.
We opposed the idea and decided not to establish a VSS. We told the forest
guards that our lands were located in the forests surrounding the villages;
our animals graze in the forests, and thus if we start a VSS, our source of
livelihood and survival will go, as the guard told us that we had to protect
these lands, and stop grazing our animals and cultivating the land.
When we opposed the Forest guards, they went to the neighbouring
villages Ramkrishnanagar and Kussigoda, and persuaded them to establish
a VSS on these forestlands, where we do podu. Soon the VSS began to plant
trees and saplings on our lands, and established a nursery to produce
saplings. In 1995, as soon as this happened, we women led the others in
our village to uproot the saplings from our lands and prepared the land
for cultivation. VSS committee members from the other two villages along
with Forest Department officials visited Pallamguda village. At that time
we women of Pallamguda were preparing the land for sowing our crops,
and the FD representatives forcibly confiscated our implements: our
hoes, digging sticks, axes, etc. They forced us to walk to the forest office,
where they made us stand in the rain all day. In 1996, two policemen
visited our village and threatened us saying, ‘You are illegally cultivating
forest land and must come to the police station’. No one went. In 1997, 15
policemen visited the village and threatened us, saying they would arrest
us if we persisted in doing podu. However, we women resisted, and continued
to carry out podu. In 2002, once again the VSS committee members
came to Pallamguda village and burnt our agriculture implements. In
2003, the same VSS committee went to our fields and burnt our field
houses/huts and the wood, which people store on their lands. Whenever
we pass these neighbouring villages en route to the market, the villagers
threaten us, and say they will attack and kill us unless we stop podu and
hand over our lands to the VSS. We, however, will never leave our land
and will continue to do podu here.
Farmers from this village also testified at the jan sunwai (public hearing)
on Forest Rights held at Delhi in 2003 (Campaign for Survival and Dignity
2003).