The Congress-led UDF Government in Kerala is busy drawing up plans for metro rail, monorail and hi-speed rail systems, airports, sky cities and industrial townships which need hundreds of billions of rupees and thousands of hectares of land but it has not yet been able to find enough land for the homeless Dalit, Adivasi and backward community people of the State to live on and cultivate.
Fed up with the apathy of the Government towards their plight, the Adivasi-Dalit Movement Council spearheading an agitation by over a thousand Dalit, Adivasi and backward community families in the forests of Arippa near Kulathuppuzha in Kollam district have decided to intensify their one-year-old stir.
Over 1,300 families with no land to live on and cultivate have been on agitation in 54 acres of plantation land (the lease period of which had ended a long time ago) at Arippa since December 31 last demanding land for building houses and earning livelihood. So far, the Government has not taken any concrete step to address their grievances.
The State Government’s position is that all such landless families could be given land build houses under its Zero landless Scheme meant for 233,322 families. As per the scheme, each landless family would be given three cents of land for building houses. The Government claims that there will be no landless people in Kerala once this scheme is implemented fully.
The Zero landless Scheme, inaugurated by Congress president Sonia Gandhi on September 30, had run into problems in its initial stage itself after the Government had allotted to people lands which were still owned legally by others in several places. There are also complaints in several cases that the lands identified for distribution are uninhabitable.
The Samithi had modeled its agitation on the more-than-four-year-long stir held by over 4,000 Dalit and backward community families for land to in the rubber plantations of Chengara in Pathanamthitta district which ended in a fiasco following the Government’s refusal to implement the conditions of a pact properly.
The Chengara agitation was withdrawn in two schedules in October, 2009 and August, 2011following an agreement by which the ST, SC and backward community people were to get one acre, half an acre and 25 cents of land respectively per family. However, the lands allotted to most of these families were uncultivable.
“The authorities are interested in giving land only to big corporate firms and encroachers. A move is now on to provide four acres of land to every encroacher of public land but the same Government is asking the poor people to be satisfied with three cents,” said an office-bearer of the Arippa agitation council.
“The Government is saying that it does not have enough land to distribute among the Dalits and Adivasis. At the same time, it is allowing big companies like the Tatas and Harrison Malayalam Plantations to keep tens of thousands of hectares of encroached land and is also refusing to take over from them plantation lands whose leases had expired long time back,” he said.
Not even a single party from the Congress-led ruling UDF or the CPI(M)-headed Opposition lDF has so far bothered to visit the Dalits and backward people living in makeshift huts in the Arippa forests in unhygienic conditions and open to the elements of nature for the past one year, giving credibility to the agitators’ charge that the ruling classes are their perennial enemies.
Only some Hindu bodies, BJP and some outfits of minority communities like the Welfare Party had visited them. Organizers of the agitation said that cultural and political leaders like poet Sugathakumari, rights worker BRP Bhaskar and State BJP president V Muraleedharan would participate in the programme being held to mark the anniversary of the stir on December 31.