In Assam, once a forest, now a settlement

On November 5, land deeds were ceremonially handed over to 1,301 Bodo families in the Charduar Reserve Forest in Assam’s Sonitpur district. Rahul Karmakar reports on the new developments and the older ethnic, communal and conservationist fault-lines being deepened 

More than 25 years after he erected a thatched shelter, Dinesh Kerketary’s dream of building a house is taking a concrete shape. The wooden support frames around the plinth beams of his 20-by-30 ft house-to-be were taken off a fortnight after he received a document granting him possession of a patch of “forest land under occupation” in north-central Assam’s Sonitpur district. 

With the Sopai river flowing behind his 13-bigha plot, 54-year-old Kerketary worked out a safe elevation of his concrete abode in Gadajuli, one of about 270 villages in what used to be a part of the Charduar Reserve Forest. The  phagla (mad) river had inundated his plot thrice since 2009 when it changed course to flow between the southern edge of his plot and Batashipur, a settlement around a railway station that serves Dhekiajuli town 13 km south. 

Kerketary was not among the people who first began occupying land in the mid-1990s by clearing the reserve forest. He moved in from nearby Sarsobari. “I was a landless farmer. I sniffed an opportunity to own my plot, but the fear of eviction never really let me sleep in peace until I received the  patta (land deed),” he said. He is relieved that the document will enable his son Paniram to get a permanent residence certificate to seek admission to higher education institutes. 

Prabhat Brahma of the adjoining Dhimapur village, who is also constructing a concrete house, has 13 bighas scattered in four places. The largest of his plots, where he grows paddy, is in Gwjwnpur village. The  patta granted to him does not have this 5-bigha plot. “When the government surveyors came to map the plots, my name was registered wrongly,” he explained. “But I am told that possessing that plot is a matter of time.”

Gadajuli and Dhimapur villages are under the Gadajuli Forest Rights Committee (FRC), one of 154 in Sonitpur district, mostly along the border with Arunachal Pradesh’s West Kameng district. All the FRCs are inhabited by the Bodos, the largest plains tribe in the Northeast.

Brahma’s paddy field, about 3 km north of Dhimapur, lies on the west bank of the Kengkra stream. A few metres beyond the east bank is Abwi Centre, a market established in 2000 and named after an unnamed  abwi (‘old woman’ in the Bodo language) who set up the first shop there. A major rural market today, Abwi Centre is one of four villages — along with No. 5 Kwdwmguri, No. 6 Sonajuli and Thaiswguri — comprising the Abwi Kouseti FRC. “Abwi Centre has some 70 families whose hopes of becoming landowners have soared after many villagers in Batashipur got their land settlement done. After government officials came here during July-September to map the plots with GPS (global positioning system) devices, we think it is a matter of time,” Biswajit Basumatary, the vice-president of the Abwi Centre Bazaar Committee, said.

On November 5, the land deeds were ceremonially handed over to the heads of 1,301 Bodo families across 15 of more than 70 FRCs in four occupied zones of the Charduar Reserve Forest. The certificates were distributed by two prominent Bodo leaders — Assam Textiles Minister Urkhao Gwra Brahma and Bodoland Territorial Council chief Pramod Boro, both former student union presidents and leaders of the United People’s Party Liberal, a constituent of the alliance government in Assam headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Also at the programme was Ashok Singhal, the State’s Irrigation Minister and the MLA representing Dhekiajuli, the Assembly constituency that encompasses the forest settlement area.