Adivasis fate thrown to the winds

ATTAPADI: The adivasis of Attapadi are living in a no-man’s land exploited by landsharks and officialdom. Lechi, a tribal woman in Varagampadi ooru,  approaches the Vigilance Department officials  inquiring into the land transfers, and states that her late husband Kakki owned five acres of land. Suzlon,  the multinational wind power solutions major,  had bulldozed her land to lay a road. But she had no documents to support her claim, not even a tax receipt. Though she remembers the landmarks on her land, she is unable to point them out as the land has been transformed. The only boundary she could point out was that of G K Goat Farms Limited which lies adjacent to her land. G K Goat Farms had acquired large extent of land during the ‘goat-teak-mangium’ euphoria over a decade ago. Suzlon  had set up 31 windmills  in Attapadi out of the 300 it had planned. A controversy erupted after it was known that some of the land belonged to the adivasis, which cannot be transferred under the law.  The transfer  was done by middlemen using forged documents.The UDF Government, after it came to power, announced the Attapadi Package under which a Vigilance inquiry and resurvey by the Revenue Department were ordered. The survey has been dragging on.  The  Attapadi Samrakshana Samithi, an Adivasi organization, has begun an indefinite relay strike from March 5 demanding their land back. The absence of ownership documents in the hands of adivasis, lack of boundaries demarcating adivasi land from other lands,  fake village office records, absence of survey figures as lands of five of the six villages lie unsurveyed  by the Revenue Department, and legal wrangles have left the much-hyped inquiry by the Vigilance and Revenue departments at a dead end.Under the Attapadi Package announced in August 2011, five paise per unit was to be given to the adivasis from the power generated by the windmills of  Suzlon. Simultaneously, an inquiry by the Vigilance Department was to be completed within three months to see which of the adivasi land owner families were to be the beneficiaries of the package.