Concept Note - Rights and Resources Initiative

S R Hiremath: Welcome to the post lunch session
on, and we have two friends who will make
presentations, Madhu Sarin and Shankar
Gopalkrishnan, and we have a discussant, R.
Shreedhar. We are basically thinking about 25mins.
for Shankar’s presentation, Madhu 10-15 minutes
and 5 minutes for Shreedhar, so we’ll try to keep
the timing as much as possible, kindly cooperate
with me. So with that I would like Madhu to get
started on the topic of, ‘Geographical Dimensions of
Land Conflicts’.
Ms. Madhu Sarin- Good afternoon everybody, post lunch session I have to keep you awake, somehow
I’ll try to be very precise and brief, and my job is
kind of quite limited and focused . In front of
you, you see this map; in your folder also there
is a folder which has a map, with a brief
commentary about it. The origin of this map,
you know while we were deciding on the case
studies and then the synthesis paper trying to
place you know the findings from the case
studies into a more kind of holistic analysis of
what’s really happening with forest and
common lands, the rights related to that and
the community dependent on that. We felt that
we should also have some idea of the geographical spread of these conflicts, not the case study ones but
generally all conflicts related to land and with a particular focus on common land. So this map is an
outcome of that exercise. Right from the beginning I would like to point out that this is a rather limited
exercise; it’s based on a study of 49 high court and Supreme Court judgments, you know an internet
search and 96 press reports in the English media, and again I would like to point out that the English
media tends to be rather selective, it does very poor coverage of the local, regional issues, and
particularly issues related to rights of local communities. Now, the 49 court cases, the majority of them
are from 2000 onwards, 9 are from 1990s, they were particularly selected because of their importance,
for example that includes the Samata Judgment. And out of the press report, all are from 2011-2012
except one from 2009 and two from 2003, again some of the older ones were selected because of their
particular relevance, for example, one related to Narmada Andolan which has been one of the longest
movements against displacement in the country. As I said, our effort was to focus on struggles related to
common lands. One big problem is that very few of these struggles actually reach the courts. Partly,
which I think Shankar will cover very well in his presentation and his paper is because of various
ambiguities about customary rights over common lands. And in any case, even where there are these
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