Disputed Industries and Discontented land losers

While shuffling for some serious topics to write on, an obituary to the Raigarh stint seemed like a perfect choice; but then I felt apt to share my perspective on a theme that has excited me even before I joined IAS.

The theme wherein the richest are pitted against the poorest and the way the government (or the officers concerned) orients itself makes the difference between a violent conflict and a win win situation...It's the theme that Raigarh district offered lots of insights into.. .The theme of Industrial Disputes^*1…

Raigarh: an Industrial (Dispute?) district 

When the people, as a collective, have grudges and misgivings against an industry that’s setup in their backyard they often resort to a confrontationist mode wherein obstruction to the industry’s operations is the usual first step.

This is also a pre-conceived methodology to involve the district administration, as any such obstruction is bound to be illegal and is usually accompanied with acts of violence against persons and properties.

In my one year's Raigarh stint, I handled 1 such long drawn dispute as the concerned Tehsildar, 3 more as the concerned SDM and a few others  I witnessed as Assistant Collector. Two of them were against public sector companies, the rest against large private firms. Almost every dispute had land losers in the forefront and in all the disputes employment to the locals was one of the key demands. The cries of "company management" being irresponsive to justify the coercive step were also common to all. 

Every industrial dispute has a core of either a genuine grudge or a deep reaching misconception; this usually forms the bulk of the demands that are projected to the people (and most importantly, the media).

Outside the core, the bulk of a dispute is created and governed by commercial-political interests. The triggering factor for a dispute is usually an astonishingly small action by the company (eg. Firing a few local contractors for Non-performance or not yielding to demands of villagers for a special bathing tank)

The usual way to deal with such situations is to first address the triggering factors. Since these are the easiest for the company to commit to, with little administrative pressure the protestors' genuine immediate demands can be acceded to.

The second step is to focus on the other persistent set of demands and separate the genuine grudges from the artificial ones; the leaders of such protests are usually seeking to push in one of their personal agenda in the garb of public demand, it becomes important to separate these threads.

The next step is to analyse what kind of commitment can be legally extracted from the company regarding the genuine concerns and meeting common ground on the same.

The final step is to tell the free riders and nuisance creators, who have by now hijacked the negotiation and the protests, to back off and let the company do its work as it won’t be able to share its profits till it makes it. Needless to say, all these steps are to be kept completely transparent and at no point should the fairness of the governmental authority be made questionable.

This algorithm has stood the test of time (only a year, and still evolving) for me and has created a win-win situation for the aggrieved villagers/land losers and the company. Yet each such dispute throws its own idiosyncrasy that makes for a nice story ... It is these unique experiences that compelled me to write this post.

*1 – “Industrial Disputes”, for the purpose of this blog post, refers to any law and order situation centring an industrial unit

Cartelisation using Government Mediation

A unique industrial dispute started in the supply chain of a prominent mining public sector company in Raigarh. The transporters of raw material went on protests against entry of "outsiders" in the transporting business. Things took a nasty turn when they started obstructing supplies (through voluntary and coerced support from fellow transporters) and sought administrative intervention/ mediation to pressurise the concerned company to not give business to those "outsiders".

Despite the precedents that mildly supported their demand for administrative intervention, such issues were left up to the company to decide.

The administration has no mandate to decide who is "outsider", given the fact that those protesting were all first generation Chhattisgarh migrants. Notwithstanding the protestors ' efforts to involve some "Professional Agitators"^*2, common sense prevailed and it died its natural death. After all, commercial vested interests alone cannot carry out an agitation if the administration and police are fair and non- partisan.

*2 - “Professional Agitators” refers to people who earn their living out of protests and demonstrations. Raigarh, being an industrial district, has dozens of them. They can be found in every drama involving any industry, their noise volumes being inversely proportional to how well they are "managed" by the concerned entity)

The Land Scam and the Clean Up

 Another idiosyncrasy was shown by a Maha-Ratna public sector company wherein the hundreds of hectares of land that it acquired were done in a way to cost the company a few hundred crore rupees extra. It was done through what we later found out to be a major land scam that involved company officials as well as lower levels of revenue administration.

The land losers who actively participated in the scam were rewarded many folds and so were the brokers.  When the district administration took cognizance of the misdeeds and worked overtime to reverse the damage done by conducting a thorough investigation, the commercial interests of many were hit. 

The resulting protests were started in the garb of developmental issues yet the root cause (which they were foolish enough to mention in writing) was the investigation into the land scam. They wanted immediate call back of the same. Normally protests like these, with no moral authority whatsoever, don’t deter companies.

However the fact that arguably every employee of the concerned company itself took active/passive part in the scam, made the company management's own moral position dicey. 

Political Hijacking Eventual Fizzling

The dispute that touched me the most was built around the most genuine concern of all- employment of one family member of a land loser to be given by the company which acquired its land within 2 years of taking possession.

As discussed before, its triggering factor was alleged firing of 25 land loser employees by the company management without giving due reason.

However the company had nearly 190 such land losers and it had given employment to only 45. I found the dispute to be a meaningful opportunity for the administration to make the company commit to employing all the 190 odd people. 

To cut a long story short, the issue soon saw involvement of the "professional agitators", active honourable political post holders and even wannabe youth leaders. With the effect that genuine and artificial issues got mixed up to an extent that was irreparable (who would teach the difference between legal mandate and a moral mandate to an emotive crowd of 300 odd people stuffed in a meeting hall?).

I felt let down because just when the company was made to came forward to give everything that it could, the "public mood" shifted to the more short term and impossible demands, leading to an entire change of focus and an amorphous end of the agitations.

Dramas and Disputes

Agreed, a lot of it is drama. 

Agreed, the front actors are usually crooks. 

Agreed, the commercial vested interest dominates the negotiations.

Yet, when I visited the villages that were affected by the concerned companies, there was a genuine grievance that I could sense in the quietest individuals. Who would usually be standing on the side lines with a perplexed  look  while the "leaders" demanded and approach me at the end with folded hands and a withered piece of paper, asking for a perfectly legal claim which should have been theirs months ago.

It always made one ask, yes we can solve these dramatic problems but why give a chance for the genuine grudge to arise?

In today's date, land matters the most. Hence our policies pertaining to its acquisition and rehabilitation matter. What matters more is their implementation - land scams during acquisition and percolation of land brokers that rob the real owners off their rehabilitation rights needs to be stopped.

District administration in Raigarh has taken suo motu cognizance of illegal land transfers and passed orders of revenue recovery in the tune of tens of crores. All the SDMs are being instructed to conduct gram sabhas in areas where land is going to be acquired in near future so as to make people aware of the rehabilitation benefits and in turn deter the land mafia that acts on the information asymmetry. I hope this trend continues here and elsewhere.

I have learnt from my mentor over the last year that a rich man in India will get its work done through the government through one way or another, it's the poor that we (in the IAS) need to proactively work for. In these Industrial disputes where the rich were pitted against the poorest, the side the Government (or I) was on was never in question. Instead of treating the protestors as criminal breachers of peace, we treated them like aware citizenry whose lawful demands we will ensure to meet.

These disputes provided an opportunity for me to negotiate on the behalf of those who would otherwise just hope to be heard and let go. I, like all the other anonymous bureaucrats, will soon be forgotten forever, yet the warmth/appreciation I felt from the genuine protestors and the memory of their contentment on being heard and addressed to, are going to stay with me..

PS: A Demi- Official obituary to Raigarh stint might still follow ;-) 

PPS: All views expressed here are purely personal and have no connection with those of the Government. This post has been carefully modified to fit into the ambit of freedom of speech permitted to officers under the Rule 6 and Rule 7 of All India Service (Conduct) Rules, 1968.

Season of Weddings: In The Name of Democracy

It's the 26th day of November today. An ordinary date - except for the fact that within the next 24 hours the ritualistic process of  my wedding will begin. Exactly a week back it was the anxiety of getting the polled EVMs back to the strong room (Chhattisgarh assembly went to elections) that described my life, now it is that of becoming a householder. In between elections and wedding, one sits here realizing how utterly similar the two are. 

Both Elections and Weddings (especially the big, fat ones) are exercises in mega event management that inevitably end up consuming the entire energy of the administrative (or the familial, whatever is applicable) setup for the preparation and conduct of "ceremonies" on a given day. Both exercises demand a lot of compromises from the routine aspects of life (again, administrative or personal) and leave the respective acting players praying for some time off.

Both are guided by heuristics/guidelines - either scriptural or ECI's. Irrespective of the source, they are almost always too cryptic to be understood by a novice and too sophisticated to render a singular interpretation. In fact, just as any other crucial event in Indian life, both elections and weddings invoke the divine power multiple times - whether it is to determine the exact date and time of submission of candidate's nomination paper or to check the match-quotient of the couple.

It's often stated that an Indian wedding is a miracle in itself - as it wrestles with multiple complications and expectations and still manages to fall into place, eventually. Over the  last few weeks, one has come to realize that elections are no different. A proactive and disciplined officer, if present at the right place, may streamline the process (i.e.decrypt the divine guidelines and cut through their absurdity to make people follow them) but there have been and are numerous places without such officers and elections have gotten conducted. One might argue the qualitative nature of things but the question of eventuality remains undisputed. So be it elections or weddings, the "Ram-Bharose" nature of things cut-through both.

A satirical perspective would not exclude the hope and utopian expectation that usually characterizes both elections and weddings. Despite that, both these mega-events are only and overtly cursed in common parlance. Yet one just hopes that maybe this time over, things will be different. Amen!

PS: All views expressed here are purely personal and have no connection with those of the Government. This post has been carefully modified to fit into the ambit of freedom of speech permitted to officers under the Rule 6 and Rule 7 of All India Service (Conduct) Rules, 1968.

CASTE : A Formidable Exploitative Force in Tribal Regions

At the outset I must admit that I cannot claim to be an expert on a region's socio-economic dynamics through my few hours of its touring. Yet, the caste based divides and the exploitative character of this caste system in Shivpuri is so flagrant that any empathetic observer cannot help but notice it.

This district is infamous in the "global development circles" (meaning the UNICEF, UNDP and the other practitioners of top-down policy models) for its appalling malnutrition levels among children. Huge funds have been poured in from the very same agencies so as to uplift the "tribal masses". Yet the affect of such international intervention over the last decade is for all to see.

I would like to sum up a few observations that I came across in a few hours of my touring -

 

The region has been the "summer capital" of the Scindias who have used its jungles for hunting and building elaborate luxury castles. The same family holds all the representative seats in the parliament for this region; On the left side is a dalit landless agricultural worker who has never seen stable employment, and has never been "selected" for any MGNREGS based work (when it is their right to get 100 days of work per year) by the panchayat officials. I wonder how he can share the emphatic feeling of the seemingly omnipresent writing on the wall.  

 

 In the local political scene, the marginalised communities claim of political neglect by all the elected candidates of the last three decades. The First-Past-The-Post system has allowed some candidates to win even with less than 10% votes of the village. In such a case all the benefits are allegedly captured by those belonging to their political clan and the rest feel unrepresented.

 

In terms of administrative empowerment, the first major stumbling factor in policy administration process is that tribal communities are treated as passive beneficiaries, with no right to choose and no ability to decide. This kind of an approach favours development of nexuses that enrich a few while rendering all public intervention futile.

Almost all the tribals complained of the domination of the upper castes in the lower level bureaucracy. This "world class" medical facility opened at the heart of the remote tribal region of Charch using UNICEF funding seems to resonate the same trend. All the employees mentioned on the board are upper castes - the same as those of the anganwadi centres, panchayat secretaries and numerous other grass-root level public functionaries.

 

In terms of initial endowments, there seemed to be two groups within the SC population of the district - while some of the Jatavs (belonging to the SC community) were well-off (from rural Indian standards), most of the other Jatavs and other SC community were living in dilapidated conditions and held no land or stable employment.

 

 

For the adivasis (tribals), there was no land or labour opportunities to talk about. The businesses in the villages marked as "tribal" for the purpose of BRGF (Backward Region Grant Fund) always seemed to be owned by upper caste Hindus who employed the tribals as casual labourers. The tribal gentleman on the right laughed at the question when I asked him if he owned land or if any revenue land ("patta") was allocated to him. He explained how a tribal spends his entire life in a hand-to-mouth existence and the only jobs they aspire for are in the illegal mining quarries of the region.

I can't end the post without mentioning a grandeous statement made by the senior district official who was incharge of our visit.

 

"Arrey bhai (to his subordinate) inhein wahaan le jaana uss sansthan mein jahaan humne un adivasiyon ko nehla-dhula kar unka mundan karwaya tha. (to us) kuchch adivasiyon mein bimariyon ki badi samasya thi, maine dekha toh paaya ki inhe dawaiyon ki nahi hygiene ki jaroorat hai - unko badhiya nehle dhula kar shave banwa kar taiyar kiya aur ensure kiya ki voh nahaye - ab aap log jayenge toh dekhna - koi bimari nahi hai udhar ! (smiling to himself)"

[He asked his subordinate to take us to an organisation where he had made a set of tribals, complaining of health problems, to have a bath and shave daily - he claimed that itself cured the diseases in those tribals].

 

What struck me in this assertion was not the seemingly fuzzy connection between shaving one's stubble and falling ill (After all, hygiene is an important factor in health), but the way he said it. The air of superiority and wisdom he echoed could have been the same if he were to be talking of some non human species that are to be managed by him. Clearly, the idea of "participation of tribals in making of decisions that affect them", will be incomprehensibly bizarre for him in the near future.