By Amar Yumnam
The government of Manipur has recently constituted a committee to evolve a land use policy for Manipur. This is a significant move. Land use and management of it have always been a major component of the trajectory of development of any place throughout history. Mismanagement of land use is one of the reasons cited for the ruin of the Indus Valley civilisation. The recent Uttarkhand experience cannot be disconnected from the land use practices there over decades. While policies and programmes of development intervention relate to a political boundary of country/province/district/block/village, land use relates to a particular ecosystem or landscape. Thus the implications of land use practices cross the limitations imposed by the political boundaries.
Land is a very emotive issue in Manipur not only at the personal level but also inter-ethically as well. Karl Polanyi so rightly put that land “invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons.” So framing a land use policy in Manipur should serve at least three purposes, given the fact that land use has path dependent implications for the development track of any region and as Oliver Wendell Holmes says existing land use imprints in the evolving character of human beings. First, it should facilitate as well as give direction to the development process the province should be following in the next hundred years or more. This would enable the state to avoid the repetition of the experience and outcome of the Loktak Hydro Electric Project. Second, it should be able to accommodate and also give direction to the diverse ethnic articulations in Manipur. In other words, the conception of land virtues in the heterogeneous society of Manipur is listened to. Third, it should inevitably provide a framework for implementing the policy with robust observance of sustainable environment principles as the region is one of the globally most important biodiversity hot-spots. So far Manipur has been under the spell of ignoring what Gordon Wolman calls “the impact of human activities on the landscape involves the concept of recovery and resilience. Resilience refers to the ability of the landscape or ecological system to rebound from the impacts of instant or progressive change. Recovery refers to the process by which an absolute change, whether achieved rapidly or slowly, can be mitigated or reversed to return a system to its prior undisturbed state.”
These are tall but imperative needs for the policy to attune to the demands of contemporary Manipur. While industrial waste and industry induced degradation of land are absent in Manipur, she now faces a problem of adverse externalities from the consumption of the industrial products. Besides, tunnelling for the railways in the mountains of Tamenglong imply that the human capability based on technology “to alter the environment… on a scale equivalent to the forces of nature, a condition that did not prevail in the past” has arrived in Manipur as well.
True to the global scenario, the people of the land have altered the face of the land. But given the expectations and the necessities for positively furthering the development process here, the pressure for a holistic land use policy has never been felt as it is today. Here we cannot afford the hitherto Indian approach of adopting any policy assuming that the country is in harmony into a singular norm, which definitely is not alive to the realities; the differential demands different approach.
At this historical juncture, the framing of a land use policy cannot be founded on any of the Indian experiences. Framing a land use policy in the case of Manipur is not just distribution of the available land resources into the different activities of life, livelihood and development. While framing a land use policy here we necessarily have to take into close consideration the heterogeneous institutional and geographical features characterising Manipur as a political entity. Evolving such a policy in a more or less homogeneous institutional and geographical context, like in Mizoram, is easier. But Manipur is characterised by heterogeneity in institutions, particularly property rights regimes. She is also characterised by heterogeneity in geography. These two are accompanied by differing levels of aggregation of economic activities and varied levels of linkages between life and opportunities among the varied institutions and geography. Besides, the food insecurity among the agricultural labourers in Manipur is highest in the country. These call for evolving a land use policy that can address the differential levels of development and take the land towards equalising the opportunities for advancement across the cross-sections of ethnicities and geography. This entails taking care of the differential attitude to investment on land across the institutions and the varied geography. In fact, with the likely possibility of the government of India giving up the yet lacklustre approach to the linking up of the North East with the South East and East Asian economies, the institutional and geographic based tensions on land use are on the rise already as expected due to the strong linkage of livelihood to land entitlements in the absence of modern economic activities and marginal scope for entrepreneurship.
In these circumstances, I feel we need to do two things. One, we have to apply our mind as contextually as possible to evolve a land use policy as a live policy to guide the governance in administering development for the future being envisaged by the people. Two, we also need to be alive to the lessons to be learnt from the global experiences. In this regard, the recent experiences of Vietnam and the African countries would be of greater relevance than that of Mizoram.