In a historic victory, Hakki Pikki, Iruliga tribes secure land ownership on the edge of Bannerghatta National Park

Over a hundred families of forest-dwelling communities secure title deeds after a six-decade-long struggle.

Sakamma Chinnappa, an Iruliga tribal woman who lives in the Bannerghatta National Park (BNP) Hakki Pikki colony, displaying her hakku patra (land title deed).  | Photo Credit: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

Chikmadaiah, an Iruliga tribal man who guessed that he was around 65 years old, lives in the Hakki Pikki colony located on the edge of the Bannerghatta National Park (BNP) around 40 kilometres from central Bengaluru. When Frontline met him last week in this settlement of around 270 families, he proudly displayed an official document issued by the Revenue Department of the government of Karnataka. Chikmadaiah held up the document gingerly using only his thumb and forefinger so as not to sully the deed that finally gave him title to the 2 acres (0.8 hectare) of precious agricultural land he had ploughed most of his life. Then, he reverentially wrapped the document in several layers of plastic before stashing it away somewhere in the dark interiors of his house. “I came to this colony 60 years ago, and even though the land belongs to us, we were finally given the hakku patra [land title deed] only on August 12,” Chikmadaiah said.

Chikmadaiah, an Iruliga tribal man of the BNP Hakki Pikki colony. He said: “I came to this colony 60 years ago, and even though the land belongs to us, we were finally given the hakku patra only on August 12.”   | Photo Credit: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

A short distance away, a group of Hakki Pikki tribal people were relaxing outside a tiny grocery store. Narayanappa, 55, whose father, Division, was one of the first settlers of the area even before the government denotified forest land for the tribespeople in 1962, said: “Many of us had given up hope that we would one day actually own the land that is rightfully ours. August 12 is a special day for us, and we can finally say that the land that we have tilled all our lives belongs to us.” He added excitedly: “Come back in October when we have our ooru habba [village festival] to see the grandeur with which we will celebrate it this year!”

Narayanappa, a Hakki Pikki tribal man and a resident of the BNP Hakki Pikki colony.  He said: “ “Many of us had given up hope that we would one day actually own the land that is rightfully ours. August 12 is a special day for us.... Come back in October when we have our ooru habba [village festival] to see the grandeur with which we will celebrate it this year!”  | Photo Credit: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

Chikmadaiah and Narayanappa’s joy is linked to a seminal event that has ramifications on the lives of forest-dwelling communities across the country: On August 12, 114 families belonging to Iruliga and Hakki Pikki communities were each granted title deeds to 2 acres of land after an epic struggle . This saga commenced in the 1960s when nomadic tribespeople who had historically traversed large territories as part of their centuries-old peripatetic existence were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to settle down. The wisdom behind this idea to “settle” communities that were averse to staying in one location and the consequent social and cultural impacts of this have been debated by social scientists over the decades, but that important discussion is not immediately relevant to this particular tale.

As part of this endeavour, members of the Hakki Pikki tribe, who came to the region of Karnataka many centuries ago, were provided land and encouraged to settle down in different parts of Mysore (as Karnataka was known at the time) through the landless tribal programme. Thus, a few members of this minuscule community, which Census 2011 estimated had grown to 11,892, were provided 350 acres of land in Ragihalli State Forest on October 29, 1962, through a denotification order (No. AFD 150/ FAF). A few Iruligas, a forest-dwelling community whose historical vocation was to weave wicker baskets, came down from Magadi and began to live in the BNP Hakki Pikki colony as well.

Even though the Social Welfare Department built dwellings and a school and even assisted with the commencement of farming in the colony, residents were not given individual title deeds, meaning that there was no record that they possessed the land they had been allotted. (Hakki Pikkis and Iruligas are recognised as Scheduled Tribes in Karnataka.) With the passage of stringent environmental laws in the 1970s, the BNP was recognised as a national park (in 1974), leading to the harassment of people who lived on its edges. Reminiscent of scenes from last year’s super-hit Kannada film Kantara, the tribal people were criminalised and often beaten up by guards of the Karnataka Forest Department (KFD) when they entered the precincts of the park to gather minor forest produce.

Things continued in this manner until a series of activists took up the issue in the 1980s. Madhu Bhushan, who is part of an NGO called the Society for Informal Education and Development Studies (SIEDS), began to visit the BNP Hakki Pikki colony in 1989 and has been embroiled in the struggle to secure the land rights for members of the colony since then. When Frontline met Bhushan in Bengaluru, she was still in the process of comprehending the tribespeople’s landmark triumph but soon began to narrate the story of the struggle along with its many tribulations.

Contestations over land in India are common and are often tied up in such a Gordian knot that any attempt to unravel the various strands is akin to banging one’s head against a brick wall. The situation of the land allotted to the Hakki Pikki colony was even more tangled up as it involved both the Revenue Department and the KFD.

To Bhushan’s credit, she plunged headlong into this thorny administrative thicket. She said: “Once I got involved, it was like riding a tiger and I just couldn’t get off.” When Bhushan and her colleagues began their work in 1989, all they had was “one document, the denotification order that showed that the land was denotified from Survey No. 1, Ragihalli State Forest”. Clutching on to this precious decades-old document, Bhushan and her colleagues began their arduous task.

Things were so confounding in the 1990s that it was not even clear which taluk this land was located in: Was it in Kanakapura as the Revenue Department surveys showed or Anekal, as the Forest Department’s 1962 denotification claimed? (Answer: It was Kanakapura). Some of the tribal people had even filed applications under the bagair hukum scheme wherein agriculturists could regularise encroached lands that they had historically tilled, but the BNP parcel was not encroached upon, which would mean that the tribal people were owners and not unauthorised cultivators. Officials of the KFD were dead set against allowing the colony to continue, and as one official dramatically said to Bhushan sometime in the 1990s: “Imagine there is a pickpocket and I put my wallet next to him. It is the same as giving this forest land to these tribal people.”

A major part of the challenge was to get senior officials of the revenue and forest departments to sit across the table and, then, to conduct a joint survey so that the boundaries of the 350 acres could be demarcated properly. This would also contradict the KFD’s claim that the land was encroached upon. This survey began in 2002 after the intervention of the then Social Welfare Minister, Kagodu Thimmappa, but Bhushan, her colleagues at SIEDS (such as Altaf Ahmed), and the tribal people (who by then had organised themselves under the aegis of the Hakki Pikki and Iruliga Tribal Society) soon hit another roadblock.

At the beginning of this century, land on the fringes of Bengaluru (then Bangalore) had meagre value until the information technology boom made land a sought-after commodity. Considering that these 350 acres sat on prime property amid pristine natural beauty, Bhushan suspected that bureaucrats and politicians had colluded with real estate mafia elements to stonewall the claims of the tribal people so that the land could subsequently be sold for an eye-popping price.

Bhushan’s claims get credence if one sees the way in which events transpired over the years: bureaucrats who were initially sympathetic to the issue suddenly and inexplicably became inaccessible; the orders of senior bureaucrats would be ignored lower down the order; and politicians such as Thimmappa and others who seemed invested in the struggle became hostile.

Elusive titles

Thus, the elusive titles to the land would sometimes seem to be just within reach but would then again get lost in a whorl of red tape. “There were so many shady behind-the-scenes actors that it was overwhelming to even get a sense of why this issue which was so straightforward kept getting mired in bureaucratic knots,” said Bhushan.

A few members of the Hakki Pikki tribe were provided 350 acres of land in Ragihalli State Forest on October 29, 1962, through a denotification order (No. AFD 150/ FAF).  | Photo Credit: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

In 2010, the High Court (by this time the judiciary was also involved) told the State government to pass an appropriate order such that “the intention of the government be formalised and the right which is sought to be reserved to the Hakki Pikki and Iruliga tribals is made clear”. This was followed by another round of hand-wringing and stalling, with files getting delayed in mysterious ways. To complicate matters further, some impatient tribal people seemed ready to be resettled in other locations after a proposal was mooted by the KFD.

In 2015, things even reached the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and here, the involvement of D.K. Suresh (Member of Parliament representing Bengaluru Rural constituency) helped in the reaching of a consensus on the official release of land by the KFD. In the same year, a public hearing was conducted on August 8—one day before the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples—in the BNP Hakki Pikki colony.

Suresh assured the tribal people that the survey would be completed and that the land would be given within the next six months. The State government passed an order after this hearing (No. FFF 172 FAF 2007 dated 28/ 09/ 2016) “transferring 350 acres of forest land to the Revenue Department for the purpose of resettling the Hakki Pikki and Iruliga Adivasis”. It took a few more years of representations and following up to overcome the final bureaucratic hurdles, and with the victory of the Congress government in May this year in Karnataka, both Suresh and his brother, D.K. Shivakumar (Deputy Chief Minister, who is the legislator from Kanakapura, of which the BNP Hakki Pikki colony is a part), ensured that title deeds were finally issued on August 12.

Leo F. Saldanha, coordinator of the Environment Support Group, who had also been involved with the issue since 2015, summed up the struggle: “At a time when forest authorities across the country have targeted the rights of forest dwellers and forest tribes in a major way, this is a significant and miraculous exception because land rights have been given to tribal people who have been struggling for 60 years. It also shows the will of the local MP and MLA (Suresh and Shivakumar respectively) who stood up against the bureaucracy, and this whole struggle also shows the incredible consistency and tenacity with which Madhu Bhushan and her colleagues have fought.”