Updated: December 15, 2020 8:45:25 pm
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Modi interacted with farmers in Kutch, including those in Punjab, during his visit to the border district to lay the groundwork for various projects. (Source: Twitter / @ ANI)
A group of farmers in Kutch, who are originally from Punjab and Haryana and have settled here, are embroiled in a legal battle with the Gujarat government over their agricultural land. The dispute dates back to 2010, when many farmers were told that their land records were being frozen because they were not native to Gujarat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was then the prime minister of the state.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Modi interacted with farmers in Kutch, including those in Punjab, during his visit to the border district to lay the groundwork for various projects.
Who are the farmers fighting a legal battle for land in Kutch?
A group of around 60 Kutch farmers have been fighting a legal battle for the past decade to retain their farmland. These farmers are mostly native to Punjab and Haryana, who bought land or received it through government grants. However, stressing that since they were not natives of Gujarat, the state government has frozen the records of the land belonging to them and 700 other farmers in Kutch. Of the total 784 farmers whose land records have been frozen, 245 are from Punjab and Haryana. The rest are from Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Most of them are Sikhs.
How did they get to Kutch?
During the 1965 India-Pakistan war, the Pakistani army had managed to enter Kutch. However, after the war, then-Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shashtri proposed to populate the border areas in the district to make the border more secure. The government incentivized settlements in Kutch by allocating land to people and providing cash donations to help them buy oxen, etc. In response, a considerable number of families from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra came to Kutch. The state government allocated land to a total of 550 people between 1965 and 1984. Of these, 390 were Sikhs, some of whom came to Punjab after Partition. They began to exploit the groundwater to irrigate their crops in Kutch and sparked a revolution in agriculture in this semi-arid district. Relatives and friends of these early migrants followed him, as the land in Kutch is abundant (Kutch stretches over 45,000 square kilometers and thus accounts for 23 percent of Gujarat’s total geographic area) and comparatively cheap. 📣 Follow Express explained on Telegram
What did the Gujarat government do in 2010?
On October 22, 2010, the Kutch gatherer sent notices to 784 farmers, informing them that their land records were being frozen as they were not eligible to own land in Gujarat because they were not native to Gujarat. The government cited a 1973 circular stating that only Gujarati natives can purchase agricultural land in the state. The freezing of their land records meant that land owners could not sell or transfer their land in the name of their heirs through mutation entries. In addition, forms 7-12 and 8-A of the records of said land came with horsemen, which made their owners ineligible to make use of bank loans, etc. In short, the freeze meant that you could not create a third-party interest in the land. The 784 land accounts included those that had been assigned by the government. Subsequently, the land records of 52 farmers who could prove it through documents that they legally owned the land assigned by the government were unfrozen.
Where is the legal fight now?
After the courts of the tax authorities, the matter went to the Gujarat High Court (HC). In July 2011, a single HC court ruled in favor of the state government, but the farmers challenged that verdict in a larger court. In June 2012, the largest bank in the HC ruled in favor of the farmer. Therefore, the state government approached the Supreme Court in 2012 with a special license request asking that no third party interests be created in the land in question. The SC granted that sentence. However, the government’s petition challenging the Gujarat HC ruling remains pending.
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