Land Laws

Agrarian reform in the 21 st century is advancing at a high speed. We read and hear the claim for Second Green Revolution to meet the food demand of the World. It is the assumption of the general public that cultivation with traditional methods yields less and adoption of advanced technology can only earn high yield to meet the demands, providing higher income to farmers. In ancient time, agriculture was not commercialised. First through barter system, then by inception of currency the trade practised and gradually it got commercialised. In protecting the rights of the farmers agriculture is getting another stature, i.e., 'corporatisation'. Technological developments, patenting, geographical indications, trade marks, etc. have made it very mechanical and at some parts of agriculture the physical labour is also put aside due to development of digitalization in agriculture. This evolution contributed much for agrarian reforms and on one side there is a kind of improvement in the standard of living of farmers. But on other side there are evidences that the farmers' position is worsened to a greater extent. They are not spared with clutches of other developments like globalisation, modernisation, urbanisation and liberalisation. This is threatening the life of farmers. Genetically Modified (GM) products take away the fertility of the land; reproduction is not possible by processing its seeds, farmers and livestock are subjected to various diseases (including the agricultural labourers). The expert opinion is that the sufferings will continue for those who consume these GM foods and the same is being carried to next generations.Thus the society is witnessing that it is the farmers' life which is directly being affected. The land grabbing, acquisition of agricultural lands, establishment of SEZs (Special Economic Zones) in fertile lands, development of industries, erection of multi-storied complexes in the tank-bed area, installation of wind mills, weather fluctuations, control of market by middlemen, corruption, etc. are among others which are violating the right to livelihood of the farmers. There are many government measures, like agricultural subsidies, credit at lower rate of interest, establishment of APMCs, health programmes like Sanjeevini, welfare measures like crop insurance, cattle insurance, etc., irrigation related facilities, 1551 service, awareness programs, and also the recent online services which aim at protection of farmers rights to life. Still farmers are struggling for their livelihood. In this article the author is intended to make a brief analysis of farmers' right to livelihood and efforts of the governments to protect the livelihood of the farmers.

The farmers are the bread winners of the entire other population of the country. They cultivate the land restlessly and provide the food for others and for themselves. The extent of land of this community varies from some Guntas/cents to hectares. They are classified as large, medium and small farmers. Irrespective of this classification they supply the food at lesser price and in some cases without getting the cost of investment. They should be recognised as special class and the government shall provide benefits to these farmers that to small and medium farmers. They are entitled some privileges of forestry, irrigation from water sheds/ponds, canals etc. The land survey and boundary settlements were made a long ago. It is also a requirement to cause these settlements considering the large scale of divisions, acquisitions, unauthorised occupations, movement of farming community to cities or towns in search of employments, deforestations, fluctuations of weather, etc. Here the author makes an attempt high light the privileges provided to the farmers together with conflicts and advancing some remedies for the benefit of the farmers.

During his political career, Gaius Iulius Caesar had to cope with serious social and economic problems; among his goals, we have obviously to remember the distributions of ager publicus. The purpose of this article is to focus on some peculiar moments in the period 64-44 BC, to establish a relationship between grain and land laws; the strong impression is in fact that the two kinds of measures were strongly antithetical and competitive for costs and purposes.

Managing land tenure has proven to be one of the most persistently troublesome issues in
peace building processes. The disintegration of both customary and formal institutions
crucial to administering land-based resources that in turn may fuel conflict, presents
particular dilemmas for recovery. Understanding what happens to land tenure as a set of
social relations during and after armed conflict is central to the identification of tools for
managing tenure and natural resource issues in a peace process. This book examines the
experiences from seventeen diverse post-conflict countries in managing land tenure and
related land issues during the transition to peace. In this chapter we introduce some of the
fundamental aspects of post-conflict land and property rights, with the following chapters
elaborating in much greater detail specific challenges, approaches, and lessons.

ABSTRACT The aggravation of land rights over time in Darfur was a primary factor in the initiation of the conflict, and has emerged as a particularly difficult set of issues in the search for viable peace. While the prospect of being able to keep land acquired in course of the conflict was a primary factor in recruitment for the Janjaweed, it came on the heels of a set of changes in the environment, land use and population patterns, institutions, law and governance that produced a highly unwieldy and volatile land rights scenario. This article explores the role of land tenure in the Darfur conflict, examining the aggravation of rights, custom, and law over time, and then focusing on two of the primary war-related tenure problems currently facing Darfur — use of land rights as tools of belligerence, and the land dispossession — secondary occupation problem.

Buildings were key indicators of the progress of New South Wales, the strange experimental colony founded by the British on the east coast of Australia in 1788. From the earliest days, artists and journal-keepers recorded the rapid growth of the town of Sydney, painstakingly depicting or listing every new structure erected by the government. Later, professional artists painted chocolate-box images of the neat, gleaming town basking in the antipodean sun, and of the increasing numbers of permanent, substantial houses nestled in romantic landscapes. Buildings were undeniable evidence of the colony’s rightful, inevitable place in the ‘Course of Empire’.

The early paintings, journals and letters seem naïve and straightforward, untrammeled evidence of building progress as it happened. Appearances are deceiving, however. Jostling in the backgrounds on both sides of Sydney Cove in those early pictures were the buildings which made up the largest, unofficial and essential part of the town: the modest, vernacular houses of convicts and ex-convicts. In the later more sophisticated paintings of stately homes and genteel landscapes, the occupation and dispossession of Aboriginal people has been erased, or is shown as inevitable.       

Permanent buildings were also fundamental to justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Those of elegance and fashion in particular were hard evidence of the colonists’ right to occupy this country, because they brought taste and civilisation to ‘savage’ shores. They are thus deeply implicated in what is, after all, the oldest fiction about land in European Australia: the idea that the way people used land, the kind of labour they invested in it, underpins claims to rightful possession and who really ‘belongs’. The concomitant fiction,  which still has popular currency today, is that Aboriginal people did not build structures, that they had no permanent place of living, and that they did not use or ‘improve’ the land. 

Ironically, Lockean ideas about land rights were also ably used by the convicts sent to New South Wales, something never intended in the original scheme for the colony, and which in the end utterly subverted it. In the towns, land was nominally controlled by the Crown in the person of the governor. But convicts simply appropriated and built on allotments, and held them by ‘naked possession’, as the legal term went. Their houses and yards were thus the stuff of urban expansion, but, as private spaces out of official view and control, they also nurtured the subversion of order. For the first forty years, a vast proportion of the early towns were occupied by naked possession– by convicts and ex-convicts with no more legal right to the land (in British terms) than the original, naked Aboriginal possessors, but with those vital additions: buildings and structures, proof of labour, mixed with the earth. In the end their occupation was ratified through freehold titles.  Yet rising paranoia about ‘the convict stain’ meant these structures were later regarded with contempt and horror. Historians have dismissed them as mere ephemera, or as evil slums - they were certainly not the stuff of nation-building.  Meanwhile the still humbler shacks and shelters of Aboriginal people forced to retreat to the fringes were always promptly destroyed whenever the relentless new suburbs reached them. This process continued right up to the 1950s.       
 
Drawing on archaeological evidence, artefacts, paintings, and documentary research, this paper explores the many ways of building in early Sydney, and argues that read together they reveal the realpolitik of struggle over land and urban space, as well as the underlying convictions about land, rank, race and empire which drowned out the ‘whispering in our hearts’ over Aboriginal dispossession.

The city of Bangalore came up with a draft structural plan 2031 to accommodate the emerging challenges of urban growth, congestion and environmental concerns through planning and regulation. In the decade 2000-2010, when the city opened itself to the booming IT industry, its developmental response to the pressures of growth has been through policy measures like airport relocation, introduction of metro rail, satellite township development, traffic improvement projects and revenue layout development. This paper focuses on regulatory evolution in the period 2000-2015 and the way the city regulations changed to accommodate this process. The study attempts to understand what drives planning regulations in Bangalore. The literature on the changes in planning laws in capitalist contexts such as European cities informs us that demands for changes in planning were made by creative class and the political class responded to the same in the interest of the city. In this backdrop, we examine the impact of private sector participation in the city planning and regulation in Bangalore city. Through an analysis of recent changes in the planning laws and the infrastructural regulations, we argue that rent-seeking interests engineered through the nexus of politician-realtor class have driven the regulatory changes in Bangalore.

In this discourse, I will present my experiences of doing an engaged research on land acquisition in West Bengal for the last 15 years.
I present my views here in the form of reflexive ethnographic encounters which took place in many sites and archives, viz. (i) in some peasant villages in Paschim Medinipur, (ii) district land acquisition office, (iii) West Bengal Assembly Proceedings, (iv) Parliamentary Standing Committee meeting Hall at New Delhi and (v) in various public places in Kolkata and Medinipur. I have used the term ethnography not in the usual anthropological sense of the term, as the holistic description of a culture but as a description of my own interaction with land acquisition in a particular state of India in a number of sites.
I have placed my encounters with land acquisition in the form of narratives which I would like to unfold before the participants of this round-table essentially in the style of a thick description. I would start my journey from the Parliamentary Standing Committee meeting Hall through the volatile peasant resistance in Medinipur villages against land acquisition which took place about a decade before the Singur and Nandigram uprisings, to the records of the district LA department and the West Bengal Assembly Proceedings and finally to come back to the villages again to juxtapose the clever dialogues and decisions of the politicians with the intuitive comments of an old man in the village wherein I conducted my fieldwork.
I believe that the above exercise will throw some light on the making and unmaking of laws and ordinances by the political elites on land acquisition vis-à-vis the rejoinder of the dispossessed towards this high-handed machination in the name of public interest in a sovereign, democratic state.

Opracowanie to pokazuje, że prawa własności są nadrzędnym elementem decydującym o rozwoju gospodarczym. Na tym tle formułowana jest opinia, że jednym z kluczowych elementów niezbędnych do zrozumienia biedy w krajach Trzeciego Świata jest powszechny brak certyfikatu własności ziemi pośród obywateli. Brak formalnych praw własności w Indonezji jest konsekwencją wadliwie działających instytucji oraz niejasnego i skomplikowanego systemu prawnego, który jest całkowicie niedopasowany do współczesnych realiów zawierania transakcji. W podsumowaniu tekstu autor stwierdza, że stan taki, skutkujący przykuciem ludzi do ziemi, negatywnie przekłada się na rozwój gospodarczy tego kraju.

This paper states that property rights are the main factor for the economic development. Basing on this statement, the author proves that the Third World’s poverty might be caused by the common absence of the certificates of land property among society. The lack of legally appointed property rights in Indonesia is the consequence of faulty institutions and both – unclear and complicated legal system, which are incompatible to modern trading standards. In the summary the author states that the system that causes people to become dependent on the land they occupy effects negatively on the country’s development.