Land and resource conflicts in India have deep implications for the well-being of the country’s people, institutions, investments, and long-term development. These conflicts reveal deep structural flaws in the country’s social, agrarian, and institutional structures, including ambiguities in property rights regimes and institutions. In 2014, a study focusing primarily on reports in the national media reflected the gravity of these conflicts. There was great interest in this narrow exercise, which prompted a more rigorous and detailed data collection on conflicts and creation of an interactive web portal on land and resource conflicts in India.
While the exercise is ongoing, this brief provides an interim analysis of approximately 289 conflicts for which data was collected thus far, covering the period between January-September, 2016. This analysis provides a powerful instrument to understand land resource conflicts in India. The emerging patterns from the analysis of the 289 conflicts provide inferences about sectoral and spatial distribution of conflicts. Based on these patterns, our assessment is that this brief has captured roughly 25- 40 percent of active and substantive land conflicts in the country.
Authors and Publishers
The Rights and Resources Initiative is a strategic coalition of international, regional and community organizations engaged in development, research and conservation. Together, we are working to encourage greater global commitment and action on pro-poor tenure, policy and market reforms.
The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) was established in 1936 as the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work. In 1944, it was renamed as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. The year 1964 was an important landmark in the history of the Institute, when it was declared Deemed to be a University under Section 3 of the University Grants Commission Act (UGC), 1956.
The Rights and Resources Initiative is a strategic coalition of international, regional and community organizations engaged in development, research and conservation. Together, we are working to encourage greater global commitment and action on pro-poor tenure, policy and market reforms.