Operational Holdings of Land Among Scheduled Tribes:Trends and Challenges

Inequality in land holdings due to socio-economic disparities curtails economic independence of the under privileged groups like Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). Lack of knowledge about land ownership rights among STs has mainly led to their economic subjugation. Over the years, operational holdings of STs has improved and in fact their average size of holdings is better than all social groups but then the before mentioned statement cannot be generalized for all the states in India. In this backdrop, the paper makes an attempt to study state wise trends and patterns of land holdings among the STs with the help of Agriculture Census report on operational holdings. The study finds out that there exist inter-state variations and not only that it highlights negative trend in the case of'medium' and 'large' size land holdings for the targeted group. The paper also examines household ownership of landholdings for STs, most importantly to understand landless ST households in the rural areas by using NSS report on 'Household ownership and operational holdings in India'. It is startling to find that the percentage distribution of landless ST households is higher than other social groups. To an extent, the study throws light on gender wise distribution of operational holdings for STs exclusively. There is still scope for land redistribution in spite of enacting laws like Forest Rights Act (FRA) and the biggest challenge is to bring down the incidence of land alienation among tribal farmers as it will enhance their accessibility to institutional credit which will eventually strengthen tribal's livelihood.