Land leasing & land rights are critical issues to address "Doubling farm Income"

Dr. Arabinda Padhee moderating the Technical Session on Doubling Farm Income at ILDC 2018 - Day 3

Land tenure security & women land rights are two critical issues to raise crop productivity as well as income of cultivators. With this argument Dr. Arabinda Padhee, Director, Country Relations, ICRISAT initiated the session “Tenure Security and Doubling Farm Income” which is the priority vision of Government in India expected to achieve by 2022. Political will from both Central Government and State Governments is the key to achieve this vision.

SS Meenakshi Sundaram, distinguished and experience bureaucrat stressed that "land tenure security of farmers is critical for doubling farm income". States have to play an active role with the external supervision of Government of India to implement land reforms, which will be the basis for agriculture development in the country. Repackaging agriculture to make it look lucrative and use of commercial standards for farmers would help to hike farmer's income.

Dr. Suresh Pal of NIAP argued that updating land records and tenure security for tenant farmers are critical for doubling farmer’s income. Property right is critical for effective agricultural development. The role of States in land reforms is perquisite for agricultural development. At the same time, ensuring women property rights are essential to enhance farm income. He narrated the case of women collectives in Kerala actively taken up land tilling successfully.

Mr. Vinod Agrawal, former Additional Chief Secretary, Govt. of Andhra Pradesh highlighted the inefficiency of present policies to tackle land reforms, as the land holdings have shrinked considerably. Only 1.3% of the GDP growth has been attributed to more secure land titling. The current Indian system does not allow to conclusively identify the land property owner, limiting the crucial investment in land. Land leasing is banned in most States, but informal tenancy is rife because many land owners do not want to cultivate, while others want to. He recommended to initiate the second round of land reforms by the States with the help of technological solutions to reduce the efforts in terms of cost and time.

Absence of tenure security and land rights, farmers are unable to access institutional credit and minimum support price for their produces. Both are practical barriers in achieving the dream of doubling farmer's income. This was quoted by Jayesh Bhatia, Director, NRMC sharing his recent study in the state of Rajasthan. Dream of doubling India farmers' income by 2022 appears difficult to achieve without proper tenure security and land rights.

Concluding the session; Dr. Padhee shared the recommendation of the expert committee presented before the Prime Minister of India on 20th February 2018 during the Agriculture Conference that  "land leasing must be legalized and liberalized Land leasing & land rights are two critical issues to address 'Doubling farm Income". As per legal framework the States have a greater role to play as agriculture and land being State subjects.

The panel concluded with a note that land leasing reform would give confidence to both lessors and lessened. It also highlighted the importance of women's active role in increasing farm income by emphasizing on Women Land Rights. The session was organized by ICRISAT, the knowledge partner of ILDC 2018.

Legal and Political Economy of Land Rights in the Scheduled Areas of India

Dr. Namita Wahi, CPR along with other panel members in the technical session "Legal and Political Economy of land Rights in the Scheduled Areas of India"

The session on "Legal and Political Economy of land Rights in the Scheduled Areas of India" was initiated with the presentation by Dr. Namita Wahi and Mr. Ankit Bhatia on the findings of recently concluded study report by Centre for Policy Research that describes the legal and political economy of land rights in areas governed by the Fifth and Sixth Schedule Areas of the constitution.

The report talks about the special constitutional and legal protections for Scheduled Tribe’s living in the scheduled areas of India and the conflicting nature of these protective yet displacing laws and policies. The reports emphasized the issue of under utilization of TSP funds the scheduled areas of India. During the presentation Dr. Wahi raised the question that why the schedule tribe are not benefited from this constitutional rights provided to them. There are lack of coherence between the Central Government and State Governments to work together. In the Tribal majority area the Central Government has a big role to play. In the year 1999 the Central Government created a separate ministry for Scheduled Tribes detaching it from the Ministry of Home Affairs. The larger debate is the question of identity of Scheduled Tribes, because they have seen people with distinctive culture, way of life and geographically isolated from the a mainstream of the society. The development, social and economic indicators are lower as compared to the population. There is a need to bring them up to stand equal with the rest of the society. Land is Central to their identity and their culture. Ankit Bhatia spoke about the contribution of other ministries to Ministry of Tribal Affairs based on the population criteria, which is around 84% of total allocation and the expenditures from these allocations are even less. 

The presentation was followed by a vibrant and dynamic panel discussion with Mr. Ambrish Mehta (Trustee, ARCH Vahini) and Mr. Ravi Rebbapragada (ED, Samata). The panel discussion opened up into a very interesting discussion with the audience among whom there were eminent stakeholders of the sector, such as the Raghav Chandra, Secretary, National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and other who advised the panel to provide implementable suggestions and recommendations for effective implementation of Tribal Sub-Plan and other Tribal development programmes. The discussion leaded to opportunities for future research collaborating various stakeholders.

People Centered Land Governance - Ensuring Land Tenure Rights to Marginalized and Vulnerable Communities

Ramesh Sharma, Ekta Parisad moderating the session on "People Centered Land Governance"

The session was moderated by Ramesh Sharma, Ekta Parisad and he opened the discussion with the issues around land governance and policy where the governability of land remains as an issue. In spite of 1200 land legislation existing in India, none of these talk about land guarantee. There has been an implementation gap where less than 12% of land is redistributed to landless poor and growing landlessness is the biggest issue before the country.

Anju Burk, Landesa highlighted that there is no mechanism for general people to know all these legislation and laws. Due to lack of awareness and implementation issues, most land goes to the influential people and land is not considered as priority by Panchayats also.

Mr. Rawat from SDF spoke about prejudices around land governance. He said Panchayati Raj system don't have an anatomy and the caste system dominates the villages and mostly urban eccentric. Land for social justice is important for democracy. Land was sidelined by agriculture or other industries. Land accusation is growing in poor counties and common lands are acquired making dalits and tribal the victims of land accusation. The industries needs to adopt democratic model with transparent land distribution approach. 

Dinesh Rabari from MARAG shared the challenges faced by the people from Gujarat who are dependent on the pasture for earning their livelihood from livestock rearing. He highlighted the recognition of pasture land to these communities which is their priority need. 

Nirmalendu Jyotishi from FES spoke how FRA helped PESA to be implemented. FRA was a game changer for people and by the end of 2011, many States implemented FRA Rules. Lack of technology and intentions, the Government could not effectively implemented FRA to benefit tribal people who suffered from the historic injustice.

Master Class on Open Data Awareness Raising by Land Portal

Laura Meggiolaro and Lissette Mey from Land Portal moderating the Master Class on Open Data Awareness

Laura Meggiolaro and Lissette Mey from Land Portal opened the Master Class as pre-session event at ILDC 2018 to raise awareness on the open data system and the challenges thereof.

Access to information is crucial to achieve good land governance. Enormous amount of information are published in the web everyday, yet the issue of accessibility, consistency and reliability still remain. India being one of the most advanced Open Data Policy in the world, still ranked low in the global Open Data barometer.

Across most countries, data on land are inaccessible. The reason being, extreme fragmentation and wealth of information, many find it difficult and time consuming while accessing a particular data from the source. Land Portal has been working on the theory of change around these lines and with time, they have managed to overcome these barriers. Land Portal, believed that the solution to these issues in accessing data would be developing open data for public.

Laura defined Open Data as “The data that can be freely used (modified) and redistributed (shared) by anyone.”

For open knowledge intervention, Land Portal have outlined FAIR principles for open data system, which narrated as Findable (easily discoverable on the web), Accessible (available for anyone without barrios viz. payment/ long in etc.), Inter-operable (needs to be in formats that allow machines to read and understand) and Re-usable (openly licensed that allows users to use and build on data and sufficient information about source of information).

Zooming in on the concept of interoperability, it is important that machines understands data. Now that we live in an era of open data, easy availability of data is important. Because machine can connect data sets and database at a speed and efficiency much beyond what humans can do. It is the machines that help us establish an information ecosystem. Thus, Land Portal act as a big repository of data and procure knowledge from different sources on various aspects of land development.

Further, in every step of the Policy Cycle, usage of data is very important, starting from identifying an issue for addressing the policy, in creating an awareness, in discussing by creating a dialogue or debate in the political space and in designing the policy and monitoring. For instance, while monitoring a policy or a programme, data plays a vital role as it helps to analyse the targets and the achievements of different indicators. 

Another approach is localization, as local information are underrepresented at the global information landscape due to the lack of attitude, capacity, technical or legal issues. Hence, search engines do not show the data sought for. To address this issue, Land Portal identify local information, building capacities and infrastructures to cover those invisible information/ institution who do not make investment on data management. In many cases, various sources show different values of the same topic, where Land Portal pitch in to harmonizing these data.

India pilot by NRMC has developed a methodology which could be used as a tool in generating data. 59% of the data are provided on land and looking at the affordability of land information. 82.2% of the data are available for free and paid access are for only 6.9%. Although there are open data available and the government making efforts to make it more accessible, but there are many constraints since only 10% is licensed as open data. Everyone publishing data should feel responsible to publish legally and technically open.

“It needs an attitude in sharing data and one should know how to share data” commented by Pranab. Hence, considering the formats that are readable by machines and using standardized keywords is important as machines do not digest the variations.

Technology to Improve Land Governance - Technical Session 1, ILDC 2018

Sri G. Mathivathanan, Commissioner cum Secretary, H&UD Department, Govt. of Odisha sharing the story of land settlement to slum dwellers in Odisha

Mr. Frank Pichel, Co-Founder of Cadasta Foundation moderated the session on technological innovation to improve land governance in India constituting sharing of experience from Odisha, UP and North Eastern States including the opportunity to include block chain technology in land governance space.

Shri G. Mathivathanan, IAS Commissioner cum Secretary, Housing and Urban Development Department, Govt. of Odisha, shared a video documentation on the historic step taken by the Odisha Government for providing land rights to the slum dwellers through a new legislation - “The Odisha Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act, 2017”. It showed the exhaustive, participatory process followed for the same and it is expected that around 2000 existing slums will have basic services such as electricity, water, sanitation etc. Land rights given under the Act are heritable, only for residential purposes, mortgable but non-transferable (to keep out the land mafia). The process was started with drone mapping so that the process does not trigger further slum settlements. Provision of land rights are followed by further support for development of the area such that the slums are transformed into liveable habitats.

Mr Munnangi, IIT Kanpur, presented the role of IIT Kanpur in bringing technology into the land consolidation (Chakbandi) process in Uttar Pradesh. The current process is manual and often takes years, at times upto 20 years. In India, 17 States and one UT have Land Consolidation Acts. Use of information technology is empowering the consolidation officers to reduce the time required to complete the process while increasing transparency. It promotes inter-agency cooperation and digitization of the records through the automated processes.

Mr. Sharma, researcher from IIT Kanpur, spoke about the need for IT in land consolidation related to spatial data. Use of modern survey techniques can reduce errors between ROR data and data collected through latest techniques. The department is currently planning to prepare complete village maps using several techniques.

Mr Sachin Garg from George Mason University presented the technologies available for Land Administration with a focus on blockchain technology and how it can be used in land administration. However, building consensus on the technology is quite expensive which is in terms of computing requirement. The concern is also that the blockchain technology has to integrate with the existing technologies. The use of blockchain technology can be best used in land registration due to its immutability. One of the key requisite of the technology is the presence of stable institutions, which India has. But before that, more research is needed to identify if the problem exists and the scale of problem (frauds).

Pranab Ranjan Choudhury, Center for Land Governance, NRMC presented on Community Led Land Mapping model using mobile technology. There are issues in updating land record relating spatial, textual and actual mapping of un-surveyed areas and integrating new rights. In DILRMP, 70% of the land records are digitized; however only 40% of the maps are digitized. Further, only 2% are updated. A community mapping approach is proposed in this scenario which combines different aspects. Pilots have been conducted with Pradan in Odisha and RNBA in Noth-East India.

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.

Land and Property Right Data Journalism Workshop

This Land Rights Data Journalism workshop will focus entirely on land and property rights. Participants will be introduced to the data journalism toolbox and given hands-on training aimed at enhancing the quality of reporting on land and property right related issues.

Participants will receive practical training on data mining, sourcing of high quality data, sifting and sorting, visualizations and conversion of complex data-sets in formats that are easy to consume by a wide range of readers. The faculty comprising data editors, senior data visualizers and reporters will train the participants on aspects related to converting data sets into high impact stories and reportage. 

The participants will comprise a maximum of 20 journalists including 6 IndiaSpend - Centre for Land Governance fellows.

Objectives of this workshop: Equip the participants to use data to bring clarity and focus to a range of issues related land and natural resources and train them to identify and report on complex stories using data visualizations and infographics.

Objectives of IndiaSpend –  Centre for Land Governance Fellowship: Identify and create the first cohort of journalists who will receive sustained guidance on writing on land rights related reports.