Opposing act
In Chhattisgarh, the newly amended SC/ST Prevention of Atrocity Act fails to bring justice to land grab victims as police refuses to file FIRs
IN GHARGHORA block of Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh district almost everything is covered in dust and fly ash. Pervasive, too, is a sense of disgruntlement among the tribal people, dispossessed of their land by two private players—trn Energy Limited and Mahaveer Energy Coal Beneficiation Limited. Their discontent is particularly directed towards the Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes (Prevention of Atrocity) Amendment Act, 2016 (poa), which they hoped will help them win over the two companies.
On June 14, 2017, 98 tribal families from four Gharghora villages— Katangdih, Khokharoama, Nawapara Bhengari and Tenda—used poa to file complaints against the private companies for wrongfully grabbing their land. “So many cases of land grabbing have never been filed under poa in the past,” says Shomona Khanna, a tribal rights lawyer and former legal consultant of Ministry of Tribal Affairs
In total, the two companies have dispossessed around 200 tribal familes in the four Gharghora villages—an area that runs up to 200 ha. While trn Energy is using the land to construct an ash pit for its 600-MW coal-fired thermal power plant, Mahaveer Energy is setting up a biomass power plant.
Eight months after the complaint, the police is yet to file a single fir. This, despite the fact, “the police has to file an fir in land grabbing complaints, as they fall under cognizable offence and poa makes it compulsory for the police to make a charge sheet within sixty days”, says Khanna. The delay basically means the purpose of the 2016 poa amendment has been defeated. The Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment, which submitted its report on the need for amending poa 1989, told Parliament on December 19, 2014, that the amendment was crucial as “atrocities against the members of SCs and STs continue at a disturbing level besides having high acquittal rates, low conviction rates and poor coordination between the enforcement authorities at the State and district level”.
“The amended Act has defined the word “wrongful” in dealing with cases of land alienation. This is an important addition because in cases dealing with the marginalised section, it is often found that the onus lies on these communities to prove the atrocity,” says Khanna.
The police claims the cases cannot be filed under poa because the Act can be used only if land owned by STs is wrongfully acquired by non-STs. And in all the cases, the companies have ensured the name on the sale deeds are of STs. “These cases do not attract the provisions of poa as it is a matter between members of ST communities. We have sent our responses with the same observation to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (the nodal agency to implement poa),” says Virendra Sharma, deputy superintendent of Police, in-charge, SC and ST Welfare (Special) police station in Raigarh.
“Even though giant structures are being built on the grabbed land by private companies, the police believes the land transactions happened between SC/ST people,” says D P Chauhan, a lawyer with non-profit Adivasi Dalit Majdoor Kisan Sangharsh, which helped the people to file the cases. He adds that even in the civil cases that were filed before the poa amendment, under the MP (Chhattisgarh) Land Revenue Code, the private companies are being tried. “In the civil cases, the court had asked the SC/STs whose names are given as
In total, TRN Energy and Mahaveer Energy have allegedly wrongfully dispossessed around 200 tribal families in four Gharghora villages—an area that runs up to 200 ha— for constructing an ash pit and a biomass power plant