Guha, A. 2006.

‘Eviction of Bargadars Under State Patronage in Leftist West Bengal: A

Policy Perspective’. PP. 219-233. In Perspectives of Rural Development: Problems and
Prospects. (2006). Eds.Rajat Kanti Das, Arabinda Basu and Abhijit Guha. Kolkata:
Indian Anthropological Society and Department of Anthropology, Vidyasagar University

Background
‘Bargadar’ or ‘bhagchasi’ is a Bengali word, which means a person who cultivates the
land of another person and takes a portion of the crop (Samsad Bengali Dictionary,
Twelfth Edition 1992). The bargadars occupy a special position in the land tenure system
in West Bengal. Traditionally, they were the bhagchasis who did not enjoy any record of
right in the land, which they cultivated. Bargadars used to get a share (usually 50 per
cent) of the crop and straw produced in a given plot of land owned by others. Before the
introduction of the Land Reforms Act in the Post-Independence period, there was no
legal security for the bargadars if they were evicted from the land by the landowners.
Even after the promulgation of the Land Reforms Act in 1955, the landowners continued
to exploit the bargadars in various ways by using their superior position in the existing
socio-political hierarchy. The left political parties in West Bengal played a crucial role in
upholding the interests of the bargadars by organizing peasant movements and through
the implementation of the legislation under a specific governmental programme named
“Operation Barga” taken up after the Left Front Government came to power in 1977. In
the initial years this programme recorded spectacular success in terms of the number of
registered bargadars. The recently published West Bengal Human Development Report
(May 2004) by the Development and Planning Department of the Government of West
Bengal reported that the total number of recorded bargadars in the state in 2000 was 1.68
million, which accounted for 20.2 per cent of the agricultural households. The report
further stated that the land covered under the cultivation of registered bargadars is 8.2 per
cent of the arable land in the state. But the same report as well as an earlier one observed
that the initial political activism regarding the recording of the bargadars declined over
the years and as a result, the pace of the operation barga programme “tapered off in the
mid-1980s and since then the rate of additional registration has been negligible” (WBHDR
2004:30-32; Mukarji and Bandopadhyay 1993: 41). An interesting projection was
presented in the Mukarji and Bandopadhyay report which calculated the rate of recording
of the bargadars during December 1981 to September 1992 and projected the rate to see
how much time would it take to bring the then remaining 5 lakh odd bargadars under
registration. They found that it would take more than 15 years to record those bargadars.
The authors of the report observed: “…the unfinished task is still considerable…The rate
needs to be accelerated. There is, in other words, no scope for complacency.
Unfortunately, however, we could not but see signs of this malady everywhere”(Mukarji
and Bandopadhyay 1993: 24).

Who Evicts the Bargadars?

Under this background we would now bring in the issue of the eviction of bargadars form
the land in which they have been enjoying traditional or recorded rights. It should be
mentioned in this context that the eviction of bargadars could take place either through
the maneuverings of the local elites or by the State itself. We would here discuss about
the second process and its various legal and policy dimensions along with the
presentation of a case study. But before going into the details let us again look into the
pages of the West Bengal Human Development Report. In pages 39-42, under the second
chapter of the Report entitled “Land Reforms” a ‘disturbing feature’ is noted. The
disturbing feature refers to the rapid increase in landlessness among the rural households
in West Bengal despite land distribution and registration of bargadars. To quote from the
Report: “There have been recent reports of increasing land alienation by pattadars, and of
eviction of bargadars, thus suggesting that the benefits of the land reform have been
relatively short-lived at least for some rural households.”(WBHDR 2004: 40) Interestingly,
the WBHDR did not make any attempt to classify, let alone analyze the cases of the
eviction of bargadars on the basis of the types of sources that caused such
impoverishments to this important category of reform benefited peasantry. The report
however, quoted some statistics from another study sponsored by the State Institute of
Panchayats and Rural Development, which found that as a whole 14.13 per cent of the
recorded bargadars have been evicted since land reform began in West Bengal. The
district-wise figures of bargadar eviction have also been quoted from the same study,
which show that percentages vary between 31.6 in Jalpaiguri to 5.66 in Malda. The
erstwhile Medinipur district shows a percentage figure of 9.29 (Chakraborty et. al. 2003
quoted in WBHDR 2004: 41). We should note that all these eviction figures refer to
recorded bargadars. No mention or hint is given about the eviction of unrecorded
bargadars who are one of the most vulnerable groups among the peasantry in rural West
Bengal. There is also no statistics in the Report on the number of bargadars evicted due to
the acquisition of land by the government for development projects (‘public purpose’ in
the legal jargon) like industries, dams, power stations, roads, mines, urban centres etc. It
may be mentioned in this connection that till today, there is no empirical or even
theoretical study on the eviction of bargadars (recorded and unrecorded) by the
government for development projects in West Bengal. It seems that the government
sponsored as well as other autonomous research institutes and even individual researchers
either did not find any interest in this issue or they have assumed that the Left Front
Government in West Bengal which is so much committed to the protection of the rights
of the bargadars, will always avoid the acquisition of agricultural land cultivated by them.
We have undertaken this study to enquire into the unexplored domain of land reform in
relation to land acquisition in West Bengal. The sections that follow are an attempt
toward this objective.
When One Law Safeguards Another Endangers
The major objective behind the registration of bargadars (the actual cultivators) through
operation barga is to prevent their eviction. The West Bengal Land and Land Reforms
Act 1955 has no provision to protect the rights of the bargadar when the land is acquired
for some public purpose by the State through the application of the colonial Land
Acquisition Act of 1894 or the West Bengal Land Requisition and Acquisition Act of
1946. The later Act is no more in vogue in the state since 1994. Here it must be
mentioned that West Bengal is the only state in India, which had started to give monetary
compensation to bargadars evicted by land acquisition since 1963 by introducing a clause
under section 23(1) of the LA (West Bengal Amendment) Act (Vaswani et.al. 1990:119-
120). But interestingly, the procedure for providing compensation to the registered
bargadars is markedly different from that of the landowners. When plots of land
involving bargadars are acquired the Land Acquisition Department at the District level
has to make calculation for the payment of compensation both for the owner of the land
as well as the bargadar. From the point of view of the requiring body for which the land
is being acquired the presence of recorded bargadar is not a comfortable situation since
for the same plot of land compensation has to be paid to two kinds of affected persons.
From the perspective of the Land Acquisition Department too, the calculation of
compensation for bargadars requires the collection of various kinds of information from
different departments of the government through a lengthy bureaucratic process. The
different steps for the calculation of compensation for bargadars are described below.

In the first step, i.e. after the date of publication of notice under section 4(1.a) of the Land
Acquisition Act, the total quantum of land under barga cultivation is determined by
taking help from the record of right (ROR) kept in the Land and Land Reforms
Department at the block level. The Land Acquisition Officer (LAO) has to collect the
names of bargadars and the terms of crop sharing with the respective owners as well as
the amount of land cultivated by each bargadar who would be affected by acquisition.

In the second step, the LAO writes to the Principal Agricultural Officer of the district to
know about the yield of crops in the area under acquisition for the preceding three years.
At this stage, the LAO also writes to the Agricultural Marketing Officer to get the market
prices of the crop in the previous three years from the material date i.e. the date of
publication of the acquisition notice issued under section 4(1.a) of the LA Act.

In the final step, with the help of the data collected from the three departments of the
government, viz. (i) Block Land and Land Reform (ii) District Principal Agricultural
Office and (iii) District Agricultural Marketing Office, the rate of compensation for the
bargadar is calculated at the price of the net average of the crop produced in the barga
land. The rate so determined shall again be fixed not more than six times of the net
average of the produce. The compensation for a particular bargadar is calculated by
taking into consideration the crop sharing arrangement i.e. whether it is 75:25 or 50:50 by
the Land Acquisition Department.

There are two important points regarding the payment of compensation to the bargadars,
which should be mentioned. The first is that no solatium (which is awarded at the rate of
30 per cent of the land value under the provisions of section 23(2) the LA Act of 1894) is
given to the bargadar and the second is requisition compensation (i.e. the time taken to
declare compensation award from the date of first notification) is not also provided to the
bargadar. Both these items are added to the compensation for the landowner under the
existing Land Acquisition Act (The Land Acquisition Act, 1894). For the payment of
compensation of the landowner the market value of the land is calculated on the basis of
the sale data of land available in the Land Registration Office at the block. Owing to the
procedures followed under the existing legal and administrative framework towards the
payment of compensation to the bargadars affected by the acquisition of land for
development projects, this group of actual cultivators always remains in an endangered
position whenever agricultural land is acquired for some development projects. Secondly,
in all likelihood, the monetary value of compensation for the bargadar turns out to be
much lesser than the landowner since the land value calculated from land sale data is
usually higher than the market price of food crops; the bargadar also does not get the
solatium and the requisition compensation Thirdly, due to the lengthy administrative
procedure which is followed for the calculation of the value of compensation for bargadar
he always receives it much later than the landowner. So, under the existing Land
Acquisition Act the recorded bargadar is really an endangered category of cultivator for
whom the Left Front Government started the operation barga programme for their
empowerment. In the next section, we would present the empirical findings of a case
study of the payment of compensation to bargadars in the context of land acquisition for a
pig-iron industry in Paschim Medinipur district in West Bengal.
Land Acquisition and Bargadars: A Case Study
About 526 acres of fertile agricultural land was acquired by the Government of West
Bengal in Kharagpur I block in erstwhile Medinipur district in April 1996 for a private
company, which proposed to build up a sponge and pig-iron industry named Century
Textiles and Industries Limited (CTIL) [Calcutta Gazette dated 8.04.1996]. Ironically,
this industry was not finally established since the company withdrew the project owing to
market related reasons and the whole issue was reported in one of the leading daily
newspapers of the country (The Statesman, 18 November 1999). But the land was not
returned to the farmers due to the inherent limitations of the Land Acquisition Act. At
present this huge chunk of land has become an open access grazing field for the cattle
population of the adjoining villages and the municipal area (Guha 2004:4620-4623). In
one of its recent publications of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation
(WBIDC ) the CTIL has been enlisted as the “upcoming”industrial unit in the Kharagpur
area (Destination West Bengal, WBIDC, 1999). The land acquired for CTIL came under
10 mouzas of the Kharagpur police station, of which two fell within the Kharagpur
municipality. The names of those mouzas are: Kalikapur (J.L.No. 137), Rajpura (J.L.
No.130), Chaksonadhar (J.L. No.136), Knatageria (J.L. No.92), Sujatpur (J.L. No. 139),
Dhekia (J.L. No. 135), Panchrolya (J.L. No.91), Tarabamni (J.L. No.138), Niranjanbar
(J.L. No.134) and Malancha (J.L. No. 131). The land in all these mouzas has been
classified by the Land and Land Reforms Department as “Jal”which yielded only one
crop in a year and did not have any access to irrigation facility. The Land Acquisition
Department considered the sale data of lands for all the mouzas that took place during
1993-95 and arrived at varying market values for the lands in those mouzas; three rates
were fixed which were Rs. 100,000/-, Rs.64, 000/- and Rs.50, 000/- per acre respectively.
The rate of compensation for the bargadars in those mouzas was tentatively fixed at
Rs.7000/- per acre only. But later different rates of compensation for bargadars were
fixed for the different mouzas under acquisition of land for CTIL. For example, it was
found from the files of the Land Acquisition Department that in the Rajpura mouza the
land value for the payment of compensation to the landowners was fixed at Rs.50, 000/-
per acre whereas in the same mouza the rate of compensation for the bargadars was
settled at the rate of Rs.4210/- per acre. Even six times of this rate turned out to be only
Rs.25, 260/- that is almost half the rate of the land value estimated for the landowners of
the same mouza. In Malancha mouza, in which the land value was fixed at Rs.1, 00 000/-
per acre (highest in the area) the rate of compensation for the bargadars was fixed at
Rs.12, 630/- and Rs.25, 260/- per acre respectively. Here the bargadars received their
compensation money two years after the landowners received the same (Land
Acquisition Departmental Files, LA case no. 8 & 42 of 1996 & 1997 Midnapur District).
We would now present some concrete empirical data collected form the files of the Land
Acquisition Department of Midnapur district to show the differential treatment of the
landowner and bargadar in the case of land acquisition for CTIL under the present legal
and administrative framework in West Bengal (Guha 2001).
TABLE 1
A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE LANDOWNERS AND BARGADARS IN
RECEIVING COMPENSATION FOR LAND ACQUISITION IN MALANCHA MOUZA,
KHARAGPUR, FOR A PRIVATE COMPANY IN 1996
Sl.No. Name of the Amount Total Date of Name of Amount Total Date of
landowner of land compensation receipt of the of land compensation receipt of
acquired received (in compensation bargadar acquired received compensation
(in Rupees) (in
acres) acres)
1 Mangala 0.32 43,357.80 16.5.96 Dasu 0.33 4,167.90 10.7.98
Hansda Behara
2 Sandhyarani 0.75 1,01,6191.85 16.5.96 Badal 0.79 9,977.70 23.3.98
Das De
3 Kalpana 0.10 14,200.00 29.1.97 Bikram 0.10 1,263.00 23.3.98
Bera Behara
&
Rakhal
Behara
4 Arati Saha 1.16 1,57,172.05 16.5.96 Sanatan 2.43 30,282.00 7.10.96
Hansda

Note: In the three cases where the amount of land acquired is not same for the owners and their respective
bargadars, there were other owners whose names could not be collected since those files were not available
to the researcher during the period when the research was conducted.

The data presented in Table 1 shows that the bargadars have received much lesser amount
of compensation and except for one case they have also received it at a later date. We
have already discussed the reasons behind this phenomenon in the preceding section. The
provisioning of lesser amount of compensation for the bargadar arises from the basic
tenet of the land ownership rules the country, which does not recognize the recorded
bargadar as one of the titleholders of the land. Through registration the bargadar only
achieves the hereditary right to get a share of the crop produced in a given plot of land
and a protection against eviction by the owner of the land. It may be noted in this
connection that till today there has been no discussion or suggestion on the part of the
government, political parties and NGO’s to make compensation payment to the bargadar
at par with that of their landowners or even keeping parity with the specific crop sharing
arrangement between the landowner and the bargadar.
Plight of the Unrecorded Bargadars by the Acquisition of Land
In the context of land acquisition, the recording of the rights of the bargadars is very
much important since unrecorded bargadars are not entitled to get compensation from
Land Acquisition Department. In our study area, an interesting case of a group of
unrecorded bargadars has been found whose claim for getting compensation against
acquisition of land for CTIL was summarily rejected by the Department in the middle of
1996.In the following table the particulars of the bargadars are presented. The data have
been collected from the Land Acquisition Departmental files referred in the earlier
section.
TABLE 2
THE DETAILS OF THE UNRECORDED BARGADARS UNDER LAND ACQUISITION FOR
CENTURY TEXTILES AND INDUSTRIES LIMITED

Sl. No. Name of the Name of the Name of the Amount of Remarks
bargadar landowner Mouza & J.L. land (in
No. acres)
1 Mahendra Nayek Gouri Sarkar Niranjanbar(154) .0055
2 Sushen Nayek Do Chaksonadhar(13 .0122
6)
3 Srimat Hembram Sambhu Ganguly Sujatpur(139) .02 Bargadar
belongs to the
Santal
Scheduled
Tribe
4 Bangu Mandi Badal Chandra Niranjanbar(154) .0062 ST, Santal
Pramanik
5 Sukumar Patra NA Malancha(131) .0105
6 Gostha Paloi Gouri Sarkar Sujatpur(139) .0071
7 Dukha Nayek Aloka Sen & Malancha(131) .01
three others
8 Mohan Nayek Rekha Ghosh & Rajpura(130) .015
2 others
9 Parameswar Nayek Do Do .025
10 Ghontu Nayek Do Do .0085
11 Bangu Mandi Raghu Kairi Kantageri(92) .0176 Santal, ST
12 Bangu Mandi Raghu Kairi Niranjanbar(154) .0084
13 Sukhendu Bishal Asoke Sen & Chaksonadhar(13 0.61 & .0061
other 6)
14 Mrigen Rana Asoke Sen & 2 Malancha(131) .005
others
15 Krishna Nayek Santi Mitra & 2 Rajpura(130) .017
others
16 Kalipada Chalak Santi Mitra & 2 Rajpura(138) .0103
others
17 Indra Kotal Rabindra Malancha(131) .0084
Chakraborty &
Soumen
Chakraborty
18 Mahendra Nayek Biswanath Malancha(131) .0315
Bhattacharya
19 Bhonda Nayek NA Rajpura(130) .023
20 Srinath Mudi Anadi Pal & 5 Niranjanbar(154) .025 Bargadar
Laxman Mudi others belongs to the
Chunaram Mudi Kora tribe
which is
classed as ST
NA- Not available.

The above particulars of the unrecorded bargadars (Table 2) have been collected from a
petition found in the files of the Land Acquisition Department of the erstwhile Medinipur
district. The petition bearing memo no. 737/Ban-O-Bhumi dated 23 rd May 1996 was
made by the then Savapati of the Kharagpur I Panchyat Samiti to the Special Land
Acquisition Officer of the district. In the letter the Savapati requested the Special LAO to
issue compensation notice to 20 unrecorded bargadars and 65 pattaholders who have been
affected by land acquisition for CTIL. The Savapati also alleged the Block Land and Land
Reforms Office, which failed to record the names of the bargadars. The petition enclosed
the individual applications of the affected bargadars along with the details (shown in
Table 2) forwarded by one Ms. Mallicka Mudi, an elected member of the Kharagpur I
Panchayat Samiti. All the individual applicants (most of whom were illiterate persons and
gave their thumb impressions) stated in their petitions that since they are poor cultivators
they could not register their names as recorded bargadars so they are not supposed to get
compensation for the acquisition of the land in which they cultivate as sharecroppers. The
hapless applicants, therefore, requested their elected Panchayat Samiti Savapati to enter
their names as recorded bargadars after proper enquiry and make arrangements for
getting land acquisition compensation. Within seven days of the submission of the said
petition, The Special LAO wrote a letter (memo no. 730/LA dated 3.6.96) to the Savapati
of the Panchayat Samiti. In that letter the LAO categorically stated that compensation to
unrecorded bargadars could not be awarded under the LA Act and the Land Acquisition
Office has already obtained a report from the concerned Block Land and Land Reforms
Office containing an exhaustive list of bargadars. The LAO further stated that under the
circumstances, no further claim of compensation in respect of bargadars could be legally
entertained. So, the matter ended at this stage. Interestingly, when the author of this paper
shown this letter of the Savapati to the LAO and a group of officials in the LA
Department and raised the issue of the non-payment of compensation to unrecorded
bargadars one officer instantly commented: “ I agree that the BLRO failed to record the
names of those bargadars as alleged by the Savapati. But could the elected Panchayat
evade its own responsibility in motivating the bargadars to record their names? What the
Panchayat have been doing in that area?”(Ibid) The spontaneous reaction of one Land
Acquisition Officer epitomized the recent ground realities of the rural areas of West
Bengal regarding the declining pace in recording the names of bargadars, which has been
perceptively observed in Mukarji & Bandopadhyay as well as West Bengal Human
Development Report. Our case study shows the endangerment of the unrecorded
bargadars in the face of a State sponsored eviction of bargadars under the Leftist
Government in West Bengal.

What is to be done?
This study has been undertaken with two specific policy related objectives. The first
objective of the study is to explore into the domain of the eviction of bargadars by a left
government, a hitherto untouched area of research in West Bengal. The second but no
less important objective of the research is to suggest some concrete policy measures so
that sufficient safeguards could be made for the bargadars endangered by land
acquisition. Our exploration revealed that neither the Land Acquisition Act nor the Land
and Land Reforms Act have any provision to protect the bargadars from development
caused impoverishments. When a requiring body (RB) submits a proposal for any kind of
project for which a particular piece of land has to be acquired the Land Acquisition
Department under the existing law conducts a preliminary enquiry to see whether the
land is free from all kinds of encumbrances (e.g. there might be religious structures of a
community) and on the basis of this enquiry a preliminary enquiry report (PIR) is
prepared. If this report clears the proposal then notification for the acquisition is made.
But as of today, the Government of West Bengal has neither made any legal provision
nor any policy guideline for the collection of information on the number of bargadars
(both recorded and unrecorded) and their economic condition while conducting the
preliminary enquiry. The bargadars, who occupy a very important position in the scheme
of land reform under the Left Front Government in West Bengal, are treated as a residual
category in the context of land acquisition for public purpose by the government. This
becomes evident when one looks into the procedure for the payment of compensation to
the bargadars affected by land acquisition. In this connection, it would not be out ot the
context to mention that the recently declared National Policy on Resettlement and
Rehabilitation (NPRR) published by the Department of Land Resources of the Ministry
of Rural Development on 17 th February 2004(Gazette of India, Extraordinary Part-I,
Section I) just on the eve of the Parliamentary Election held in May 2004 also does not
contain any rehabilitation package for the bargadars. Under these facts and
circumstances, we suggest the following policy measures, which could be adopted by the
Government of West Bengal to provide adequate safeguards for the bargadars who might
encounter impoverishment caused by land acquisition for development projects.

1. Given the fact that acquisition of agricultural land for development projects would
continue in West Bengal and it will proceed at a faster rate even under the Left
Front Government within a liberalized economic policy adopted by the
Government at the Centre, there should be some safety net for the vulnerable
groups of peasants, like the bargadars, who have been empowered by the LFG.

2. The process of creation of safety net for bargadars in West Bengal should begin
by making changes in the method of calculation of the compensation for the
bargadars. Since a recorded bargadar gets either 75 per cent or 50 per cent share
of the crop under the L& LR Act, he should also be entitled to receive 75 or 50
per cent of the total value of compensation calculated for the landowner. This
would also enable the bargadar to receive the compensation at the same time the
landowner gets it. Land being a State subject, specific legislation to this effect
should first be enacted in the State Legislative Assembly.

3. The Government of West Bengal should make it mandatory for the Land
Acquisition Departments in the districts to count the number of bargadars and
ascertain their economic condition at the time of conducting the Preliminary
Enquiry. During this enquiry, the number of unrecorded bargadars along with the
recorded ones should also be enumerated. Here, if the Department clears the
project, then all the unrecorded bargadars should be recorded before the issuance
of acquisition notice, so that they get the full share of the compensation money
after the acquisition.
 4. There should be a legislation that if in any area under acquisition proposal, the
percentage of bargadars (recorded and unrecorded) and the pattaholders in the
PIR turns out to be equal or more than the overall state percentage out of the total
number of landowning households, then land acquisition in that area should not
be allowed to proceed. The rationale behind this recommendation derives from
the fact that bargadars and pattaholders are not only poor and marginalized
sections of the peasants, but they are also the direct beneficiaries of the land
reform measures initiated by the state government in 1977-78. So, land
acquisition by the government in an area, which has a substantial number of
bargadar and pattaholder households, would be self-defeating to the process of
land reform in West Bengal and will not cater to social justice and greater public
purpose.

If the Left Front Government adopts the aforementioned policy measures by taking into
consideration the ground realities and the legal aspects of the payment of compensation
of the bargadars, then it may again help West Bengal to become an exemplary state in
the field of land reform as it was 20 years ago. (4450 words)

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the staff of the Land Acquisition Office of erstwhile Medinipur District for helping me to
collect the official information during 1999-2000 on the various aspects of the payment of compensation to
the bargadars in West Bengal. I also express my sincerest gratitude to Michael Cernea who first suggested
me to take up the case of sharecroppers as one of the vulnerable socio-economic categories in the context
of development caused displacement.

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