From Bhoodan to a land scam

There is no record of about 50,000 acres in Gujarat

Half a century after Vinoba Bhave initiated the Bhoodan movement to distribute land to the landless, it seems that close to 50,000 acres of land donated in Gujarat has ‘disappeared.’ It is feared that a sizeable portion of the land might have fallen into the hands of contractors and builders.

While there are no records of the land transactions available, the last known details about the movement were published in 1994 in a book Sarvodaya-Gandhi Savaso.

According to page 71, there was about 1,03,530 acre of land donated of which only 50,874 acre has been distributed.

Survivors of the movement, DNA spoke to were unable to throw light on the status of the remaining 50,000-odd acres. “The 50,000 acres of undistributed land must be with the original donors or farmers. “All the ‘ dan patras’ (donation certificates) are gone. But names of donors and details of land distributed are on our registers,” said eminent Gandhian, Jagdish Shah, who has been the secretary of Gujarat Sarvodaya Mandal for years.

As per the Bhoodan Act, the land donated was meant for farming and could not be sold or leased. A Gujarat Sarvodaya Mandal was also formed in 1959. But some Gandhians suspect that much of the land donated in cities had fallen prey to rapid urbanisation.

“There have been instances where Bhoodan land has been misused and we are in talks with the government to conduct a survey and introduce a new GR,” Shah said.

“The irregularities that took place must have taken place in the last 20 years, especially in cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Rajkot,” Shah said.

The records mentioned in the book state that in Ahmedabad about 7,356 acre of land was donated of which only 1,713 acre was distributed. As many as 336 families were given land.

“Most of the land that was given away in Ahmedabad is the in western half of the city. After the municipal corporation was formed, farmers lost the land as they could not sustain it,” said Chunibhai Vaidya, a noted Gandhian who had participated in the movement. The total number of donors were 18,327 and 10,270 families are said to have been the beneficiaries in Gujarat.

“We know of several cases where builders were eyeing Bhoodan land and suspect that a lot might have changed hands. We want to form an independent board and form a tribunal as per which land distributed after 1973 be termed illegal,” said Muljibhai Shah, secretary of Gujarat Bhoodan Samiti.