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In precocious November 2024, the Haryana Legislative Assembly amended the Haryana Village Common Lands (Regulation) Act, 1961, to licence the conversion of definite categories of Shamilat deh under unauthorised concern into backstage ownership done outgo to the gram panchayat, a model further streamlined and expanded successful 2025 by shifting support powers and diluting the market-rate constraint. The authorities presents this arsenic an administrative colony to trim litigation, retrieve worth for panchayats, and resoluteness long-running disputes implicit commons pending successful gross courts. It argues that wide residential and cultivation encroachments person made a negotiated buy-out preferable to protracted ineligible battles.
A twelvemonth on, the question is not lone whether the amendment clears the docket, but what benignant of agrarian bid it consolidates. Common lands are a governmental institution, shaping livelihood security, bargaining powerfulness successful agrarian markets, and dependence for the landless. If the quality to wage becomes the operative criterion for title, regularisation risks converting de facto possession into de jure ownership successful ways that validate elite seizure alternatively than close it.
Commons and power
This hazard indispensable beryllium work against Haryana’s longer past of Shamilat deh governance and Dalit exclusion, wherever encroachment is seldom accidental. Field-based enactment connected colony commons (Sucha Singh Gill, Pramajit Judge, Manjit Singh) and K. Gopal Iyer’s synthesis documents however Dalits’ “due rights” connected communal onshore person been systematically denied, with encroachment often sustained done patronage, sarpanch and authoritative complicity, and unequal entree to paperwork and coercive authority. This is not lone a scholarly claim.
A 2007 Haryana Institute of Rural Development (HIRD) survey of Bhiwani and Karnal districts recorded outsiders benefiting from colony communal land, panchayats not enabling Dalit families’ entree to cultivable parcels, and Dalit households failing to realise statutory shares due to the fact that they could not vie with ascendant landowners successful lease markets. It further noted that astir 15% of encroachment by ascendant landowning communities had the backing of sarpanches, officials, oregon politically influential persons, portion richer households captured disproportionate benefits by bidding higher lease rates.
Scale of capture
The aforesaid HIRD workout provides a consciousness of scale. It reported 28,628 acres nether encroachment retired of 2,01,875 acres of cultivable shamlat land, constituting 14.18% of the cultivable commons. It besides compiled administrative information connected 8,270 cases filed betwixt 1994 and 1995 for amerciable possession of 21,137 acres of shamlat land. The inclination enactment is the point: by 2009-10, encroachment cases pending successful gross courts reportedly reached 19,476, astir 2.35 times the 1994-95 figure. These numbers clarify what is astatine stake. When encroachment is structurally produced and politically protected, a “pay-to-legalise” plan predictably advantages those with liquidity, paperwork capacity, and societal networks.
Field-based agrarian governmental system from Haryana reinforces this broader diagnosis. Agrarian beingness is stratified by onshore and caste, while landless Dalit households stay concentrated successful insecure wage enactment and tiny self-employment and beryllium critically connected basal payment access. specified arsenic the nationalist organisation system. In specified a setting, regularisation done outgo is not a neutral technique. It tin shrink the already constricted spaces that supply marginalised households a measurement of autonomy from ascendant landowners, portion stabilising the gains of those who tin construe possession into a ceremonial title.
The State’s rationale is intelligible; litigation is costly, and decades-long occupations make uncertainty, constrain panchayat planning, and foreclose revenue. Yet technocratic colony is not distributively neutral. By treating the occupation arsenic backlog absorption alternatively than a continuing signifier of dispossession, the amendment risks normalising encroachment and converting that normality into ownership done payment. This is simply a governmental prime astir who deserves the commons, adjacent erstwhile framed arsenic administrative efficiency.
A opposition with policies elsewhere clarifies the normative hinge. In restitution-oriented frameworks, communal oregon specially earmarked lands are treated arsenic corrective instruments to buffer the landless and historically oppressed, and immoderate States person implemented this logic with comparative seriousness. Madhya Pradesh’s inaugural of distributing a large information of charnoi land to Dalits is simply a wide example. Tamil Nadu’s Panchami lands were likewise earmarked for Dalits, reflecting an explicit premise of extortion alternatively than treating the commons arsenic a negotiable asset. In purchase-oriented frameworks, by contrast, the commons go a negotiable plus allocated done willingness and quality to pay. Haryana’s amendment leans toward this second logic: without archetypal addressing humanities entitlement, caste-based deprivation, and the statutory intent of commons arsenic a societal information net, it risks granting malikana haq while leaving the underlying injustice intact.
There is besides a authorities of visibility embedded successful regularisation. Policies of this benignant often contiguous themselves arsenic administrative housekeeping, and marginalised groups are expected to judge colony arsenic “practical.” Yet assistance connected Kanshi Ram’s “counter-diplomacy” highlights a broader inclination for caste to beryllium deflected from authoritative framings adjacent erstwhile Dalit claims persist. In the commons’ context, the accusation is direct; without transparency and institutionalised avenues to contest, ceremonial legality whitethorn beryllium achieved astatine the outgo of deeper illegitimacy.
A fairer plan would hardwire safeguards truthful regularisation does not go a conveyor loop for elite capture. Titles should travel mandatory socio-economic and caste profiling with panchayat-level disclosure and privateness protections, and hierarchy of claims aligned with statutory intent, including precedence for landless and historically excluded groups. Ecologically and socially captious commons, should beryllium excluded from conversion. The process should beryllium independently audited, with credible grievance redress insulated from section enforcement discretion. Finally, proceeds should beryllium earmarked for distributive repair, and lawsuit clearance should beryllium time-bound and paired with ineligible assistance truthful marginalised claimants are not priced retired portion better-resourced occupants adjacent disputes done payment.
Justice oregon tidiness
The 2024 amendment frankincense crystallises a wider hostility successful modern agrarian governance: onshore argumentation arsenic societal justness versus onshore argumentation arsenic administrative tidiness. In a agrarian governmental system structured by caste and unequal entree to livelihood diversification, legalising encroachment without archetypal correcting for structural inequality is not simply quality resolution. It is the State selecting a colony successful a long-running societal conflict, and calling it efficiency.
Anand Mehra is simply a doctoral researcher astatine the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. Vignesh Karthik K.R. is simply a postdoctoral probe affiliate astatine King’s India Institute, King’s College London
