Note: the Hindi part of the webinar has been subtitled in English. Hindi subtitling will be done shortly. Abbreviations and technical words and phrases are listed below the webinar description and the link to the session webpage for further resources. The live translation during the webinar is not included here.
26 September 2025
“Sasandiriko Horonkokoa Patta” (“The burial stone is our title deed”, Mundari saying)
This session looks at recent changes in land and forest governance legal regimes at both national and local levels. The state claims these changes are necessary for ease-of-doing-business in resource rich areas, but which sabotage the long Adivasi tradition of sustainable governing of agrarian and forest land and resources (“jal, jangal, jameen”), much of it as common lands. Therefore, as our speakers have discussed, in reality, these changes are legalising accumulation by dispossession in the Adivasi and forest areas through simultaneous lawfare and techno-managerial bureaucratic apparatus that operates in plain sight.
In the first part, Dayamani Barla, Social Activist, Journalist and Convenor, Adivasi–Moolvasi Astitva Raksha Manch, Jharkhand, India, takes us through how land governance by the state has become reduced to bureaucratic land administration in service of neoliberal capitalism. Dayamani explains how has been enabled by the digitalisation of land records in the name of modernisation, the land bank policy, and the SVAMITVA* scheme that aims to bring in “conclusive titling” of residential rural residential properties.
In the second part, CR Bijoy, who engages in issues of resource conflict and governance in India, unpacked the grand designs of “lawfare” in national laws that affect Adivasi land rights, their autonomy, and right to self-determination. For example, the politics behind the piecemeal amendments in mining, environment, forest and wildlife conservation, and biodiversity laws; and the politics of forest administration and conservation elites that systematically sabotage the Forest Rights Act 2006.
For more resources on the topics discussed go to the webinar homepage here: https://www.academicfreedomindia.com/…
*SVAMITVA: Surveying of Villages Abadi and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas
Other abbreviations in the subtitles
CNTA: the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908
LARR: Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013
NIC: National Informatics Centre
PESA: Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996
SPTA: the Santal Parganas Tenancy (Supplementary Provisions) Act, 1949
UPA: United Progressive Alliance