_4.3.2 Land alienationfrom tribal groups_ Orissa has a large tribal population (22 percent of total population, three times the average for India) and tribal land alienation by moneylenders has long been recognised to be a critical issue. Tribal people, with generally low educational and skill levels and limited access to formal credit markets, have had little option but to seek credit at high rates of interest from moneylenders. In the event of default on loan repayments, moneylenders have tended to appropriate first tribals' forest produce, and later their land itself. This process has been reported in numerous village studies dating at least as far back as Bailey's classic study of socio-economic change in a western Orissa village since the late 19th century (Bailey, 1957).

Alienation of land held by members of Scheduled Tribes (ST) has been restricted by legislation as a matter of public policy. After Independence, the Constitution of India enabled state governments to make regulations restricting alienation of land by STs in Scheduled Areas. In Orissa, Regulation 2 (1956) in Scheduled Areas provides that land held by a person belonging to a scheduled tribe cannot, without permission of the appropriate authorities, be alienated to a person not belonging to a scheduled tribe. The law also allows for a _suo moto_ action by the Collector for restitution of alienated tribal lands. Section 22/23 of the OLRA applies to prevent land alienation by tribals in non-scheduled areas.

In practice, however, land alienation remains prevalent if officially unacknowledged (Fernandes _et al.,_ 1988). When money is lent, the loan agreement ensures that the moneylender has rights over all the produce for a certain number of years (usually nine). Since the borrower is therefore left without any income, he is forced to keep borrowing, thereby mortgaging the produce of his land for many subsequent years. Rights to the produce of the land eventually accrue to the moneylender for such a long period that tribal land owner is reduced to the status of little more than a bonded labourer producing crops for the moneylender, on land that legally remains his own. One study of four districts (Dhenkanal, Ganjam, Koraput and Phulbani) estimated that about 56 percent of the total tribal land was lost to non-tribals over a 25-30 year period through these means (Viegas, 1987). Of this total, 40 percent was lost through indebtedness and land mortgage, 23 percent through encroachment, 17 percent as a result of displacement by development projects, 15 percent through personal sale, and the balance due to floods and other natural calamities.

A less well-understood pattern is the administrative erosion of tribals' communal land rights through survey and settlement operations themselves. In recent decades, cadastral survey by the chain survey method has gradually given way to the plane-table method to reduce operational costs. But land with a gradient greater than 10 percent cannot accurately be surveyed by the plane table method, and in Orissa these unsurveyed lands have customarily been lumped together as 'uncultivable wasteland' in the record-of-rights in land (Roy Burman, 1987). The outcome is catastrophic for tribal groups. In a 1961 land survey and settlement operation in Niyamgiri hills of south-western Orissa, for example, only 15 acres out of a total village area surveyed of 2647 acres were declared to be 'cultivable land' (Roy Burman, 1987). Only on this land was rent assessed and demanded of the 16 owners in the village. One acre was recorded as grazing land, 7 acres under housing, and only half an acre classified as common land for the village graveyard. The remaining 2624 acres, being of a gradient greater than 10 percent, were recorded as (state-owned) 'uncultivable wasteland'. In reality, much of this area was owned by tribal households, and was cultivated in demarcated plots on which fruit trees had been planted.

Anecdotes abound concerning the loss of tribal land to powerful interest groups and the lower levels of the land revenue administration. Even discounting a certain amount of exaggeration, it is difficult to _53_