Dalits fight against all odds for promised lands across India

In 2014, Bihar--where almost 90% of dalit farmers are farm labourers--became the first state to recognise that lack of possession was a problem that needed state intervention

Rambhau Kamble was five years old when he first saw Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. On that February morning in 1941, Ambedkar--eight years away from framing India’s constitution but already the most prominent dalit leader of his times--addressed a public rally in Marathwada, now a part of the state of Maharashtra in western India.

“Every dalit from the region was there,” Kamble, now a frail 80-year-old, recalled at his one-room house in Gharegaon village in the southeastern Maharashtra district of Osmanabad.

Kamble is among the nearly 100,000 dalit farmers who heeded Ambedkar’s call and occupied grazing land, termed ‘gairan’, across