The New Nation - Internet Edition

THERE was a time when landlessness which accompanies poverty and its attendant ills, affected a far smaller part of the Bangladesh population than today. But the number of the landless people is noted to be rising in the country. People are forced to sell their last parcels of ancestral holdings after falling into worse poverty conditions in the wake of natural calamities; river bank erosion also leads to loss of homesteads and croplands. Those without land join the ranks of the worst ones in extreme poverty. According to one reliable assessment, the number of the landless in the population was 28 per cent in 1972. The number has increased to 50 per cent at present. Bhumi Adhikar Parisad, an NGO, claims that the number of the landless today is as high as 54 per cent.

Considering the links between landlessness and poverty, it is important to put a hard brake on the process that forces people to become landless. One way of doing it is to distribute government owned lands, called khas lands, among landless people. There is a countywide programme designed for implementing this method of empowering the poor but it suffers from pervasive corruption and neglect. A report published in a national daily some time ago highlighted that in the Sylhet district about 53 per cent of the distribution of khas lands remained pending while the 47 per cent of those who received khas lands were undeserving persons. Locally influential groups get their favourite persons to become beneficiaries in the settlement of khas lands at the expense of ones who should have got ownership rights over such lands in view of their landless state and acute poverty.

In both the cases unlawful squatters are also in possession of khas land by exercising their links to locally powerful vested interest groups. The situation in Sylhet is symbolic of khas lands distribution in other areas of the country. Clearly, the report indicates the need to take action on two fronts: to ensure that truly landless and very poor persons get entitlement as well as effective possession of khas lands and the eviction of undeserving people from their current occupation of such lands. Furthermore, insurance to cover various assets of rural people needs to be introduced along with laws and their enforcement to discourage sale of lands under distressed conditions. The availability of institutional credit to poor rural people must also increase. All of these steps and more will create conditions for reversing the process of landlessness as people will be hedged from conditions of extreme poverty that create the compulsion for them to sell their lands to survive.