Small farmers wage a big fight over land

UDHAGAMANDALAM: Periyanna takes off an apron and hat fashioned from old rice sacks, rolls down his trousers and flattens his wiry hair. “The monsoon set in last night, so I’m preparing the land again,” says the farmer, who is the head of Kattimattam village in Gudalur in the Nilgiris. “A farm always demands work from you,” says the 65-year-old.

Like Periyanna, most villagers of Kattimattam are small farmers with less than three acres of land, who have settled in forest areas and grow tea and vegetables. Not all of them have ‘pattas’ or the right to live there but are fighting to hold on to the land and protect the forest around it from commercial exploitation on a large scale. Small farmers from 128 villages in the taluk have united under Vivasayigal Thozhilargal Munnetra Sangam (VTMS), which translates into farmers and labourers’ development association, an organization of dalits, Malayali settlers and Tamil repatriates fighting for land rights.

Over the last 15 years, VTMS has brought these small farmers together to resist everything, from illegal logging to land-grabbing to the forest department’s efforts to evict them.

Land ownership is a complicated issue in Tamil Nadu’s Gudalur taluk, which borders Kerala and Karnataka. The two kinds of occupants here are large landowners and small farmers – both are in different ways encroaching upon the forest.

In the pre-Independence days, the forests were controlled by chieftains from Nilambur — now in present-day Kerala. They hunted in the teak and rosewood-rich forests. The British recognized their rights over these areas as private ‘janmam’ land.

When the British decided to set up plantations, the janmis leased them large parts of the evergreen deciduous forest.

In 1969, a law abolishing “janmam” rights was passed. But the estates — whose leases had not yet run out — challenged the takeover of land by the state government.

The case went on for decades and reached the Supreme Court, which said the estates could not expand further or change
the landscape.

“But the estates continue to expand their activities and take over more land,” says M S Selvaraj, VTMS founder. “The janmis destroyed the forests by converting them into tea estates. The government never acts against the large estates and the land and timber mafia. The forest department only harasses small farmers, accusing them of degrading the forest when the estates are more at fault,” he says. “We don’t want to degrade the forest either. We know how much it gives us.”

The small farmers are mostly Malayali settlers who crossed the border in the 1960s or poor families who took over land for cultivation. Sri Lankan Tamils, repatriated to India following the pact Lal Bahadur Shastri and Sirimavo Bandaranaike signed in 1963, also form a large part of the VTMS membership. These repatriates either settled here or bought forest land with dubious papers.

VTMS functions as an organization — not an NGO — collecting an annual subscription of Rs 60 from members and creating awareness on the Forest Rights Act 1996. “Until we joined VTMS, we could not work or sleep in peace,” says Periyanna. “The forest officials would demolish our houses, slash our crops and keep trying to throw us out. Now, we have even set up an anganwadi here and have two teachers.”

The different communities — Tamil repatriates, local dalit farmers and Malayali settlers — were often at loggerheads too. “We now work together to till the land, protect the forest around our village. VTMS has united us and given us the courage to fight,” says Thangatchan of Kattimattam.

“Every time an animal is killed or a tree cut, the forest department tries to foist a case on us but we were the ones who stopped trucks smuggling timber from here into Kerala a few years ago,” he says, pointing to a square of weather-beaten concrete at the entrance to the village. “We stopped the forest department from building a watchtower here. We know best how to protect the forest.” Kattimattam is one of the 54 villages in Gudalur area that have decided they should have control over the forest resources where they live.

In Devalahatti, famous as the area that gets the second highest rainfall in India, villagers say their methods of cultivation are natural. “We respect the forest. But we would like to have the patta issue sorted out. The government has been ignoring us and that is what we are fighting,” says Ramakrishnan, a Sri Lankan repatriate who works half an acre of land. “Right now, with all this uncertainty, it is the forest that continues to get destroyed.”