CPR Land Rights Initiative is pleased to invite you to the launch of the Mapping Indian Land Laws Website, followed by a panel discussion.
About the Mapping Indian Land Laws Website:
More than seventy years since India became a constitutional democratic republic, almost 60 percent of Indians depend upon land for their livelihood. Land is not only the most important economic resource for most Indians, it is central to individual and community identity, history, and culture. Worryingly, land conflict is ubiquitous in India today, and threatens its economic development and its social and political stability. Millions of Indians are affected by conflict over land, which threatens investments worth billions of dollars. Land disputes clog all levels of courts, accounting for the largest set of cases in absolute numbers and judicial pendency. Conflicts between laws, and individual and government failure to comply with the rule of law, create legal disputes. Yet, the number and extent of land laws in India is anyone’s guess, because there is no existing publicly available comprehensive database of land laws. This in turn restricts citizen access to the laws that govern one of the most important aspects of their lives, thereby hampering the realisation of the constitutional promise of participatory democracy.
Over the past five years, researchers at the Land Rights Initiative (LRI) have travelled the length and breadth of the country to create a database of over one thousand colonial and post colonial central and state laws. The LRI team has painstakingly collected officially authenticated copies of all originally enacted central and state laws from a geographically representative sample of eight states, namely, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Punjab, and Telangana, numbering five hundred. From laws pertaining to land reforms and land acquisition, to revenue and taxation and land use; forest and mining laws to laws applicable to Scheduled Areas; from laws promoting and regulating urban and infrastructure development, to laws dealing with evacuee, enemy, ancestral and religious property, this vast legal apparatus governs the lives of the people of India, and their interactions with each other and the state. All five hundred laws have been thoroughly analysed according to thirty one parameters of classification, and summarised to be comprehended by a lay audience. Through this process has been birthed the most comprehensive, online interactive architecture of land laws in India.
About the Panel:
The panel discussion will feature comments on the importance of this project in mitigating land conflict, creating an informed citizenry, and deepening democracy by a distinguished group of speakers. The panelists will share perspectives on how the MILL website will respond to the needs of scholars, policy makers, government officials, civil society organisations, lawyers, and corporates.
