failings are inability to foster meaningful forms of local participation<sup>27</sup> , and the tendency for village management committees or panchayati raj institutions to be 'captured' by factional politics (Blair 1996, Ahluwalia 1997).

The depletion of village commons has been brought about by various processes operating in parallel. Owing to the failure of land ceiling laws to bring about any significant redistribution of privately owned ceiling-surplus land in practice, many states have instead sought to redistribute some public land ('wastelands') to landless households. Such _dejure_ privatization of commons has not always led to _defacto_ control over land by the landless. In Orissa, for example, the very act of pressing a claim to such land is regarded as illegal in the first instance, so that the rights are practically impossible to 'regularize' (Mearns and Sinha 1998). Although significant benefits have accrued to the recipients where land has been redistributed, in spite of the small size of land parcels allocated, much of the land redistributed is of low quality and generates low and uncertain crop yields. Many beneficiaries do not have access to the complementary resources (labor, capital, draft animals) required to make more productive use of such land. Moreover, state land redistribution has often disproportionately benefited non-poor rather than poor households. In Jodha' s survey, for example, the disparity in land holdings between poor and non-poor widened as a result of the privatization of village commons in Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan (Jodha 1986).

Alongside such _dejure_ privatization there has also been a parallel process of _de facto_ privatization or encroachment on commons in many areas, involving the permanent or seasonal annexation of formerly common land for private crop production. Often it is the relatively higher value patches of land (e.g. moist depressions in drylands) that are encroached first, which leads to a reduction in the benefits to other users out of proportion to the share of common land lost. Those who encroach on commons tend to be non-poor farmers with more family labor and access to complementary inputs to enable them to farm the land effectively, and who are able to persuade or bribe the local _patwari_ to manipulate the record of rights in land in their favor (Ahluwalia 1997). The lack of clarity regarding local land records, and the high cost and long duration of litigation, leaves other land users and panchayati raj institutions with few options in challenging instances of encroachment<sup>28</sup> . As and when efforts are made to update land records in revisional surveys and to improve land administration systems (e.g. through title registration where appropriate), it is essential to consider ways of handling common land so as to be better able to prove instances of encroachment. If attention is not specifically paid to the inclusion of commons in a unified land administration system, efforts to improve land conveyancing systems may actually facilitate rather than hinder further encroachment on commons by the non-poor at the expense of socially excluded groups.

- 27 Financial subsidies or matching grants are commonly used to induce people to contribute their labor for various purposes, which does little to ensure the sustainability of interventions once the subsidies are withdrawn (Kerr _et al._ 1996, Kolavalli 1998).

- 28 Judicial interference has been suggested to be even more important in inhibiting successful challenges to instances of encroachment. Courts have become accustomed to granting 'interim stay orders' preventing the eviction of a private party, without the opportunity for local voices to be heard. Whether or not they are poor, private parties (e.g. individual farmers) are generally perceived by higher-level courts to be the 'underdog' in cases concerning government land. A whole category of lawyers specializes in stay orders and constitutes an important stakeholder group in its own right (T.V.Somanathan, pers. comm.).

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