1. Land and Development: Centre-staging Connections and Building up Traction
Of late, land has increasingly been figuring into the global and local development paradigms, for positive as well as negative reasons. Land rights champions, in particular, as well as development communities in general, are now seeing the signs of a global land rights revolution brewing. More inclusive development is now possible, with new hope of improving land records of excluded communities or rebooting green revolutions with women land rights or for that matter acknowledging and furthering the rights of indigenous communities for more effective conservation. In India, land is back on the development agenda, after the land-reform waves in post-independent decades, with Forest Rights (FRA, 2006), Fair Compensation Rights (LARR, 2013), Land leasing reforms, Women inheritance Rights (HSA Amendments, 2005) and a revamped DILRMP, all underlining and reiterating the development connections. This growing acknowledgement at global and local levels, is evident with number of SDG targets and indicators including land rights concerns. Time seems to be now ripe to leverage upon these triggers and build greater momentum by mobilzing collaborative actions to amplify and expand these and other critical land-narratives and initiatives and integrate them into the contemporary development considerations in policy, practice and investments.
2. India’s Land Sector and Governance: Diversity and Disconnections
India’s land governance is one of the most complex, with a very long history and highly pluralistic tenure regimes. While it has demonstrated technological excellence and innovation in land administration with substantial reformist intents, it also has a high landless population; and a majority of its judicial disputes are around the land. Its ambitious growth trajectory has been ridden with stories of land conflicts and exclusion. Making land governance inclusive is imperative to ensuring and sustaining India's development needs. However, the Indian land ecosystem remains characterized by administrative siloes, geographical multiplicity, socio-cultural diversity as well as sectoral fragmentation and actors isolation.
While land disciplines, engagements, and actors expand, protective or bureaucratic boundaries of departments, sectoral and institutional siloes , often prevent connection and conversation, limiting the scope of cross-learning, cross-fertilization, disruption, and innovation.
3. India’s Land Sector and Governance: Scoping Strength and Synergies
India’s land tenure diversity and complexity are not only problematic; also an opportunity, which is getting lost in such artificial boundaries and perceptional barriers. Good practices, learnings, and innovations are dying geographical, sectoral and institutional deaths, so as important issues and challenges. However, sporadic innovations and engagements around collectivization and connection have also unleashed and evidenced seamless potentials and have triggered transformative impacts.
Expanded and synergistic engagements around land and allied disciplines are critical to achieving sustainable development goals. Doing so is incumbent upon assimilating and connecting land engagements, disciplines, professionals and practitioners across social, cultural, legal, natural and applied sciences. Taking land governance beyond often straight-jacketed and closed domains would require the building of disciplines, curriculum, profession, career, institutions, and commitments around enriching the discipline of land tenure and governance and also building bridges with other disciplines. Contested and disconnected landscapes of contemporary land governance in India justifies and demands inter-sectoral, interdisciplinary, inclusive, multi-level intensive and inclusive engagements.
4. ILDC Initiative: Good Beginning, Need to also look Beyond
The India Land Development Conference (ILDC), initiated in 2017 as an annual inclusive Land Convergence platform for collective exercise for learning and advocacy. Established by a collaborative initiative of local and global land-institutions, ILDC promotes inter-sectoral, inter-disciplinary and multi-level conversations on land and development. It has been able to help researchers, practitioners, governments, businesses, entrepreneurs and professionals to come together and interact at an open and inclusive platform.
It promotes informed and changed conversations, build interdisciplinarity and empathy, help dialogues among discourses, sectors and geographies and carve spaces for innovations and disruptions. It has also demonstrated and will also continue to be convening for connecting land actors.
The imperative is how to make land conversations more impactful. How to make them more enriched, connected, rooted and diversified? Also, how to better and logically connect them to policy and practice through longer-term and intimate engagements of these actors beyond this temporal and spatial window of ILDC? The requirements of engagements around land issues are also increasing; expanding the engagements in terms of actors, disciplines and intensity is critical, while also keeping them interconnected for the desired synergy.
5. Exploring India Land Ecosystem
There is a need as well as merit in exploring towards building an inter-disciplinary, intersectoral, multi-level alliance of land actors, with adequate interconnections, to maintain a flow of conversations and resources for desired complimentary, efficiency and synergy. The need is look beyond and look within; an idea of a Land Ecosystem, with interconnected land actors, helping, debating, complimenting, supplementing and building synergies, amplifying magnitude, adding value and triggering impact with evidence and convergent actions. This should not undermine the critical contributions and future role of existing sectoral land networks; rather would help and strengthen them and each actor through complimentary connections, like a natural healthy ecosystem nourishing each element.