Land not only directs trajectory of families but also the trajectory of nations - Tim Hanstad , ILDC 2018 Inaugural Session

Inaugural Session ILDC 2018

#IDC2018 has begun with an intellectual discussion on land rights providing an overview of land tenure status of India vis-à-vis the other parts of the World. The inaugural session was graced by Dr. T. Haque, Niti Aayog who chaired the session. Tim Hanstad, founder of Landesa set the tone as key note speaker. Pranab R. Choudhury the organizing secretary of India Land Development Conference highlighted the rationale and objectives of such an initiative and Jayesh Bhatia, Director, NRMC put forth the way forward and challenges ahead before ILDC and solutions to carry forward this initiatives during the second edition of ILDC 2018.

Tim Hanstad on his key note address narrated; how his personal family story connects with land and how land changes the trajectory of family history and country’s history. He spoke about the importance of land in India; prioritising eight highlighted topics.

• Providing land to the landless - World’s largest landless people are residing in India and how land could be accessed by those landless people to change their life.
• Regularising informal occupation of land to ten millions of people in India who do not have a legal rights over the land they have occupied and it’s imperative for regularising these land in their favour. 
• Improving the land records in India which is generally in a poor state which needs to be improved. There are varieties of steps and measures are being taken now. We need to learn from the best practices continue to update and correct the land records in India.
• Introducing farm land leasing legislature by the states - Farm land leasing will be an important toll to providing access to the poor farmers and also increasing agriculture efficiency. India has developed a model act which needs to be adopted diligently.
• Simplifying and harmonizing state level land related laws - Most of the state laws are overly, cumbersome, irrelevant and outdated and sometimes inconsistent. There is need to take steps to make these laws simpler and clearer.
• Increasing land related legal awareness and services - Women in particular and poor people in general often having a low level of awareness about the laws and rights under the law which needs to be improved. Also it requires much more collaborative and coordinated effort in India to resolve.
• Closing the land data gaps currently existing - In India there is a need of more researchers involved in this process to identify what interventions are working and what are not to bridge the land data gap. The second data gap is foundation of data. Currently there is no idea that how many people have land rights and what is the nature of those land rights. Government needs to more systematically collects the data and may also take the help of non-governmental efforts towards collection of data such as Prindex, which is a very important initiative capturing land data in India.
• Strengthening women’s land rights - Women feeds the world and there are very large percentage of women involved in land based livelihoods; whereas very few women holds rights to land. Women access to land through their relationship with men which needs to be changed. India to improve both economically and socially needs to improve women’s land rights.

Dr. T. Haque in his address put up the historical perspective of settlement of land beginning from 1950's where only five million acres of land was redistributed under Land Ceiling Act. The biggest challenge for land governance he talked was to balance between the conflicting demands on land from urbanization, industrialization, infrastructure development and agricultural needs and the key is to ensure greater stakeholder participation.

Jayesh spoke about engaging on the agenda of land governance by generating more evidence based impact and promoting an collaborative effort through partnership of institutions and efforts.