DOMICILE POLICY OF JHARKHAND
The Forest, Environment & Climate Change Department of Jharkhand, mentions the association of the state with the forests. It has 29.76% forest cover, spread over 23,721 sq km; 32 indigenous communities classified as Scheduled Tribes (STs) make up one-fourth (26%) of the state’s population; 13 districts are fully covered & three are partially covered under the Fifth Schedule Areas (FSAs). A third of Jharkhand’s population (31.6%) is urban, nearly half of which is concentrated in four cities—Bokaro, Dhanbad, Jamshedpur, and Ranchi (Census 2011).
The Jharkhand Definition of Local Persons & for Extending the Consequential Social, Cultural & Other Benefits Bill, 2022, was passed on 11 November 2022, by the Jharkhand legislature. As per the bill, a person can claim to be domicile of Jharkhand, if they can link their ancestry to the “1932 Khatiyan.”
Khatiyan is a record of rights, including land rights. Almost all the states have some domicile policies , to protect the interest of local population, but there is no condition to quote historical records of land. In Khatiyan system, land is central to the sociocultural fabric of the community.
The new bill empowers gram sabhas to grant domicile status for landless non-Khatiyanis , as per the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Area Act 1996. The bill has been debated among the urban & rural people, tribals, Moolvasis & Dikus (migrants from other states). Social activists, community-based organisations, and civil society organisations expressed their concern towards this bill.
KHATIYAN SYSTEM
Khatiyan is a system of recording community & private land tenure rights with detailed information including – plot number, area, quality, & possession of land , simultaneously with land record-keeping. It derives from the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (CNTA), 1908 & Santhal Parganas Settlement Regulation (SPSR), 1872, and was operationalised by the British govt. through survey & settlement operations completed at different time points in parts of Bihar, such as in Santal Parganas in 1873–1910, and in the Chota Nagpur region over 1869–1935.
The contentious debate on domicile status is inextricably linked to the historical and more recent development paradigms adopted by the state and the subsequent processes of in-migrant flows and industrialisation, the political economy and the electoral politics that have favoured a neo-liberal development approach, and the resultant public service and private employment patterns in Jharkhand (Lorduswamy 1997; BIRSA 2002; Munda and Bosu Mallick 2003).
The socio-economic & political background of the Jharkhand state is emerging from the “Jharkhand movement”—one of the largest people’s movement in modern history. Which had inherent demand for a separate state for tribals and Moolvasis, but also for a development paradigm that is inclusive of all (Munda and Bosu Mullick 2003; Pingali 2023).
The domicile policy under the Khatiyan system of 1932 have assertion for their dignity, solidarity, historical discrimination and marginalisation by Dikus. So the attempts by successive governments to bring ‘domicile’ policies with different perspectives, made the Jharkhandis & Dikus to stand against each other. (Sengupta 2014; Venktesh 2016; Minj 2022).
Jharkhandi identity was asserted through different phases of movement. Jharkhand state govt, created a criteria of state domicile for the recruitment of class III & class IV jobs. However this criteria was scrapped by, Jharkhand High Court.
The Khatiyani Johar Yatra started On 8 December 2022, reasserted the question , “Who can be a resident of Jharkhand?”, generated a strong local opinion in the form of resurrection of identity based on ancestral records of Khatiyan holders. The identity of being Khatiyani native has been protected and garnered by , Fifth Scheduled Area administration & two important historical legislations – Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act ,1908 & Santal Parganas Settlement Regulation (SPSR), 1872.
These laws contain special provisions for Scheduled Tribes & Moolvasi (comprised of Scheduled Castes, Backward Castes & others) landholders in the Fifth Scheduled Areas, that is, they can sell their land only to another person from these sections, after gaining the deputy commissioner’s permission (Katyayan 2015). Land held by those “other” Khatiyanis can be transferred without permission.
The earliest Khatiyans were derived from the cadastral survey settlements conducted in the Santal Parganas in 1873–1910, & in the Chota Nagpur region in 1869–1935. Revisional survey settlements were done between 1927 & 1935 only in the Chota Nagpur region. Post 1947, another round of revisional settlements was initiated but only completed in some districts.
Upadhyay (2009) includes a detailed account of manipulations in the revisional surveys in Singhbhum in 1958–65 and Lohardaga in 1994, which enabled the state to appropriate common lands. More recently, some districts have seen digitisation of land records, but these are considered less reliable.
The pre-1947 Khatiyans are considered more reliable compared with the more recent ones. Part one of the Khatiyan records, has two sub-parts, the name of the raiyat (cultivator of the land) & lists all the trees on the land .
According to Khatiyan system the fruits & flowers of these trees are possessions of the entire village, only the timber is the possession of the named landowner. This dynamic understanding of land-based communitarian and resource rights of the Adivasi–Moolvasi communities are enshrined in the legislations and operationalised in the Khatiyan. While traditionally inheritance passes through the male line in the tribes, many female names appear in the Khatiyans, particularly unmarried women & widows.
When the British introduced the concept of private property & the “rule of law,” dominant-caste people from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Bengal used the opportunity to become “named” landowners. The tribes, whose land records were represented by their burial stones, found their lands usurped and “their traditions and habitats pushed to the periphery” (BIRSA 2004; Hebbar 2003). With these developments & increasing in-migration, the outsiders popularly called as ‘Diku’, which were considered as, “outsider-exploiter” (Munda and Bosu Mullick 2003: vii; Sengupta 1982).
Post the 1950s, various development projects & industries encouraged employment of people from outside Bihar, & for whom townships were developed by the government & the industries. These highly educated, urbanised, technology savvy, and economically well-off in-migrants started dominating Jharkhand’s economy, bureaucracy, and polity.
Thus, today, Dikus include such employees , industrialists, traders , merchants & bureaucrats who came to the state primarily to acquire its material resources through advancing industrialisation & mining, occupy influential administrative posts & placed power in the hands of those who share the ideology of the wealth aggrandisement over sustainable living for all (Lorduswamy 1997; Munda & Bosu Mullick 2003; Puthumattathil 2014: 218; Sengupta 1982, 2014).
In 2014, the then chief minister, Raghubar Das(BJP),was Jharkhand’s first non-tribal chief minister, originally hailing from Chhattisgarh, announced another “domicile policy,” which stated that those who have been living in Jharkhand in pursuance of their business or jobs and have acquired immovable assets in the last 30 years (1985), or their children, would be considered local residents of the state. (Pandey 2016).
Furthermore, the employees of the Jharkhand government or state-controlled institutions, or other such entities and their children, were also eligible for domicile. This policy was reviewed and revised by the current Hemant Soren government.
Veteran political observer, Manthan, explained that alongside the practice of declaring all seats in the state public services as open seats, Das’s policy notification reduced employment opportunities for “the sons/daughters of the soil,” that is, the local tribes and Moolvasis.
Dikus have often had better educational opportunities or were purposefully recruited by disregarding rules (Singh 1994; Sengupta 2014: 25). Also, colonies for employees were set up on the acquired lands & as people retired, they were able to “buy” their properties, which was not what the tribals had intended when giving up their land (Sengupta 1982).
The Jharkhandi Tribes–Moolvasi demand to use a record of land tenure rights from the British era as the basis for determining the domicile status. It is a notion developed against the outsiders (Dikus) , who were occupying all the important positions in the bureaucracy, private sector jobs, industries & other economic activities. The state was a part of the Chota Nagpur plateau, which was administered by the British colonial govt from Bengal.
The earliest tribal agrarian movement in the modern history of the region was led by Tilka Manjhi in the Santal Parganas in 1784. It culminated in the Kol rebellion (Kol Insurrection) of 1831–32, with categorisation of the Jharkhand region as a “non-regulation province,” that is, legislations proposed for the entire province would not apply here unless they were agreeable to the people of this region.
These collective struggles compelled the British to draft Wilkinson’s Rules (1833) & the first record of rights, the hukumnama recognising the communitarian agrarian rights & local self-governance of the Adivasis. Such recognitions were followed by continuous agrarian movements, which were contained by the British by re-categorising Jharkhand in 1874 as a “scheduled district,” then as “backward tract” in 1919, & “partially excluded area” in 1935, alongside the enactment of more land laws.
The Chota Nagpur Tenures Act, 1869, SPSR, 1872, and Chota Nagpur Landlord and Tenant Procedure Act, 1879 were passed. Following Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan of 1874–1901, the British passed the CNTA, 1908 for the Chota Nagpur region, and post 1947, the Santal Parganas Tenancy Act (SPTA), 1949 was passed for the Santal Parganas (Bara 2022; Katyayan 2015; Singh 2019; Sundar 2005, 2009).
Post 1947, Jharkhand became a part of Bihar, when states were recognised on the basis of language. Several tribal districts of Bengal, Orissa & Madhya Pradesh were separated from the Jharkhand region with the intention that the tribal population remained less than the total population of these states as well as for the redistribution of the rich natural resources and mineral belt, rain forests and water resources of the Chota Nagpur plateau area across different states for economic reasons.
In 1950, the Constitution of the newly formed India inscribed the demand by the tribal peoples for self-governance and continuance of communitarian rights by re-designating “partially excluded areas” and “excluded areas” as special legislative zones: the Fifth and Sixth Schedule Areas of the Indian Constitution (Katyayan 2015; Sundar 2009).
The more recent people’s struggles against the public-private model of development, including the 2017 Pathalgadi movement and the current ongoing resistance against implementation of the Survey of Villages Abadi & Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMTIVA) Yojana, draw strongly on Adivasi–Moolvasi identity question as well as self-governance.
The SVAMITVA Yojana is the union government’s “one nation, one software” scheme claiming to end conflicts over land by ensuring conclusive titling of residential (abadi) land in rural areas, which will be recorded on a plastic “property card.”
However, field observations in Khunti district revealed that drone mapping was also being done of non-abadi land and flouting of the government’s standard operating procedure for implementing the scheme, and the process, as of now, remains halted in Jharkhand .
Land policy & legislation experts and the experiences in other states also highlight several concerns around the scheme, including wrongly recorded names of title holders (Property Rights Research Consortium 2020; Rupavath 2021; Thara 2022).
The digital Adhikar Abhilekh (Records of Rights) uploaded into the recent online land record system under the National Land Records Modernisation Programme (NLRMP), 2008 and Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP), 2014 also reveal that each digital land record is turning revenue land into a private property regime, overlooking the traditional/Khatiyani system of recording community land tenure rights granted under the CNTA.
The SVAMITVA Yojana property card scheme was introduced in 2020, and examination of the digital land records and litigation work in courtrooms has revealed several discrepancies between the digital Adhikar Abhilekh and the paper Khatiyan.
Since Khatiyan Part 2 is not yet digitised, it is feared that community rights will eventually become non-existent, which is a real question of social justice. In areas where pre-1947 Khatiyans are not available or do not exist, the last Khatiyan, however recent, will be used for purposes of determining domicile status (Singh 2020: 183)
Compared to other Khatiyans, most Jharkhandis consider the Khatiyans from around “1932” more trustworthy than those from after 1947. This is because the British survey settlements were more meticulous & reflected the ground reality than post-1947 attempts, including revisions. For example, many discrepancies have been noted, particularly in connection with the common lands which were recorded as government lands, in the revisional settlement surveys done in Singhbhum & Loherdarga (Upadhaya 2005; Vasan 2005).
The recognition of the symbolic “1932 Khatiyan” in the bill of 2022 is thus not paradoxical but in line with the enduring legal pluralism that is characteristic of the Indian subcontinent (Sundar 2009).
The concept of domicile thus merges the different social, demographic categories, which Singh (2009) calls a strategy of “double deployment” to counter the vulnerability imposed on Adivasis–Moolvasis.
SOCIAL PLURALISM
The drafting of FRA, 2006 & its implementation in Jharkhand is a unique episode in Indian history. Four different categories from the FRA, 2006 legislation are distinctly applied here: STs, OTFDs (Other Traditional Forest Dwellers), forest rights on individual and community bases, & recognition of forest rights.
The term “Khatiyani” not only includes all four categories, but also conveys multiple meanings, such as different castes & communities; forest dwellers’ enjoying land rights; rights to fruits and flowers on the trees and shrubs (minor forest produce); separate rights to timber as well as non-timber products; and rights to natural resources.
The ‘other traditional forest dwellers’ are mostly Moolvasis ,they are Khatiyanis, the traditional landholders, & include persons belonging to SCs, BCs, and those from the other general categories.
Hence, it is not necessary to ask for inclusion of the bill in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, as has been done so by Soren. Mahato (2022) opines that, some social activists, CBOs & CSOs have favoured the state’s decision to request parliamentary assent for including the 2022 bill in the Ninth Schedule to ensure its longevity.
There is historical precedence here as the domicile policy of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are included in Article 371D of the Constitution, and are thus exempt from judicial review.
This linkage between sthaniyata and land record of rights symbolises how Jharkhandi languages and existential identity (bhasha and astitva), culture and development are linked to a knowledgeable and judicious use of natural resources (BIRSA 2002; Singh 2019) .
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