Land Tenure System, Land Settlement and Status of Legally Landless Communities in Koraput: A Case Study of Kapsiput Village, Odisha (India)
Land is the most critical factor of production for a myriad of economic activities for human settlement worldwide although it is in limited supply. It is therefore, essential that its allocation across different economic activities and uses should be based on sound theoretical premises, combined with the ground realities of multiple objectives -a few of which regularly exceed the narrowly defined goals of economic growth per se. For traditional communities, ‘access to lands is directly associated with civilization paradigms and cultural ethos, which rather decide their ‘economics’, and not one other way round that could be true for modern, techno-centric civilizations. Most mainstream discourses of history have, however, tried to find the crisis in the ‘absence of state interventions and a dig into the social history points to deeper roots of the crisis, which rather intensified after the entry of the ‘welfare’ state. In a predominantly, agrarian economy such as for example in India and Odisha, the entitlement to livelihood and access to the factors of production, especially land and forests, are essential objectives that require to ascertain allocation of land across different uses and users. Our study reveals the allocation mechanism must not only address the requirements of economic activities or sectors including housing but additionally look into the specific needs of numerous ecosystems, regions and communities. A cursory look on the policies concerning revenue land in Odisha suggests that the ultimate authority lies with the state government to allocate land wherever necessity. Our study finds that sufficient care should be taken to engage the communities with the revenue laws in the state. In this paper, we have tried to unravel the critical issues of land and emphasised as to how communities can manage and allocate lands in a democratic, judicious and equitable manner. The case study also emphasizes the role of increased interface with revenue admin
