[NYTr] India's Landless March to Parliament Halted

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Guardian - Oct 29, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2201351,00.html

India's landless prevented from marching on parliament

by Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi

Thousands of landless workers, indigenous people and "untouchables"
from the bottom of Indian society were today prevented from taking
their demands to the country's parliament - the final leg of their
month-long protest march.

Despite giving the authorities months to organise for the arrival of
the 25,000 protesters, police told the organisers Ekta Parishad that
demonstrators could not leave their field in central Delhi where they
have been camping since Sunday.

An Ekta Parishad spokesman told reporters that the marchers, many of
whom had come carrying their belongings on their head, were facing an
"acute shortage of water".

"It is miserable for them," Jagdish Shukla said.

The Janadesh, or "People's verdict", march has seen the participants
walk 200 miles since October 2 in a bid to highlight the growing divide
between rich and poor in Indian society. Organisers said that since the
march was non-violent, they would wait "patiently" in Delhi for an
"appropriate response".

In recent years India's gathering industrial boom has displaced
hundreds of thousands of rural poor from their land. The result has
been violent protest - this weekend two people were shot demonstrating
over plans to set up a chemical plant over 9,000 acres in West Bengal.

Many industrial groups are increasingly concerned that issues of land
ownership have prevented projects from taking off. Albert Brunner, the
chief executive officer of Bangalore international airport, told a
conference today that when work started on the new terminals no one had
told the villagers they were to be moved off the land.

"We had a situation where we were building around villages and moving
around them," he said.

The marchers have demanded that the Indian government make good on its
promises to reform land and tenancy rights. Many of India's poorest
people, especially from tribal communities, have lost land because of
the absence of property deeds.

PV Rajagopal, the Gandhian activist behind the march, said a solution
could be found. "We need to have a national land authority, identify
lands available for redistribution and then regularise holdings of the
poor and the marginal peasantry. It is about changing the pattern of
the development so the poor benefit too," he said.

The government is understood to be working on a compromise that will
compensate those whose lands and livelihoods are lost in India's drive
to modernise.