In Delhi, villagers want govt to first secure their future

MORE TROUBLE FOR INDUSTRY

The state and the farmer are once again at the crossroads and the battle this time is being played out right in the national capital on the Delhi-Haryana border village of Kanjhawla.

At stake is about 1,450 acres of farmland belonging to six villages that will house factories relocated from non-industrial areas of Delhi under a Supreme Court order.

The farmers are, however, not willing to part with their land despite a Delhi government notification to this effect in 2005.

After Singur, Kanjhawla is fast becoming the scene of another battle between the government and the farmers.

Industry is not in the picture yet, though the land has been declared as industrial. For the last one month, 29 days to be precise, over 150 farmers from six villages have laid siege to the Divisional Commissioner’s office in Kanjhawla. The courts, which take up cases from all over North-West Delhi, have been closed for a month and a huge police force stands guard inside with the farmers and their women keeping a watchful eye outside.

They let you go inside to talk to the police, but within minutes, a woman, her face covered with odhni, comes in and demands that you leave. No one can go in without the permission of the villagers and no one can overstay.

A hookah is placed in the middle of the gathering and elderly denizens of the villages and their sympathisers from adjoining areas take turns at it even as they chant loudly that Sheila Dikshit will not be allowed to take their land.

The Bharat Kisan Union (led by Mahendra Singh Tikait), the Jan Sangharsh Vahini (a land rights organisation) and the National Alliance of People’s Movement (led by Medha Patkar) are supporting the agitation.

NAPM lawyer Sanjay Parikh said this could be an opportunity for the rest of the nation to get in place a law to protect the rights of the people over their land as well as the land they work on.

The villagers say if they are made to sell their land, they must be paid the market price —which is in the range of Rs 2-3 crore per acre.

But more important for them than the price is the arrangement for the future. “The future of our children is at stake. They may give us money but that will not ensure that our children’s future is secure,” says Raj Singh Dabas, one of the villagers at the forefront of the agitation.

“We want partnership in whatever project comes up here. The government must pay us Rs 50,000 a year for 30 years . We also want a small industrial unit to be allotted to each person selling his land,” he said.

Neighbouring villages are supporting the movement. Says an aging Kushal Singh, who owns seven acres of land: “I will die but I won’t give my land for less than the market rate”.

The villagers had earlier gheraoed the Vidhan Sabha and held several rounds of talks with the Delhi government. The government, on October 1, came out with a gazette notification increasing the compensation amount per acre from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 50 lakh. Says Raj Singh Dabas: “Had the Sheila Dikshit government agreed to our earlier demand of Rs 75 lakh (per acre), the matter would have ended there.

But now the villagers are not ready to accept anything less than the market price. They understand that even that won’t ensure their future security, so they want an annual payment as well as a share in the plots that will be given to industries”, says Dabas.

Tomorrow: How the villagers look up to Haryana