GUWAHATI: Leader of Congress legislature party in Assam, Debabrata Saikia, has moved the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) against the eviction of indigenous people belonging to the ST and OBC communities in the Tinsukia and Nagaon districts by the state government.
Since the great earthquake of 1950, around 1,300 families of the two communities have been living in the Laika-Dadhia area of the Dibru-Saikhowa Wildlife Sanctuary in Tinsukia district. Their settlements have been razed and they live under an open sky. Locals are also up in arms in Mikir Bamuni under the Samaguri revenue circle of Nagaon district in central Assam where successive generations of these two communities have been cultivating land since 1981.
“The government is now seeking to evict them (Laika-Dadhia settlers), thereby going back on successive assurances over the last three years or so that these hapless people would be suitably rehabilitated. Consequently, the affected people have been staging a protest since the last week of December 2020 at a make-shift site near the DC’s office in Tinsukia. A couple of people have lost their lives because of the cold and among them is a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Many others protesters are suffering from fever, nose-bleeding etc...,” read the letter sent by Saikia to NHRC on Monday.
Saikia attached a report procured from the office of the Tinsukia DC, which mentions that the affected families were living in the Laika-Dadhia area since the 1950s and before the area was notified as a sanctuary.
About the prevailing tension in Mikir Bamuni in Nagaon, he alleged the district administration is handing over the land to a private solar power company without “proper notification” to the affected people, who were given only a day’s notice to file their objections, if any.
He said the cultivators do not possess any documents such as record of rights regarding the land they and their forefathers have been tilling for almost four decades.
Saikia said in his letter, “The Assam (Temporarily Settled Areas) Tenancy Act, 1971 provides for bestowing of ownership rights on ryots who cultivate a specific plot of land for three years in succession. It is clear that the deprived people have been tilling the land in Mikir Bamuni grant for much longer than three years in succession. Further, the land allocation is being done on the basis of the false claim that the land in question is uncultivated.”
A farmer was killed by wild elephants in the area in 2018 and the government paid compensation to the family, but the Congress leader alleged that the report submitted by local officials concealed the fact that the area is an elephant corridor ‘in an obvious ploy to facilitate the land allocation’. This arbitrary, hasty action of the state government violates the legal land rights of the ryots,” he added.
“This kind of harassment and illegal deprivation of fundamental land rights of people is a violation of basic human rights. Moreover, such acts are definitely in violation of various provisions of Section 3 of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989,” Saikia asserted, urging the commission to take suo motu cognizance of the matter and issue show cause notices to the Assam government and the respective district administrations.