Around 50 farmers, including women, and members of the Karnataka Pranth Raita Sangha were arrested and released on Friday after they staged a demonstration in front of the Deputy Commissioner’s office here demanding ownership rights for bagair hukum cultivators.
Maruti Manpade, KPRS State president, urged the Revenue Department to demarcate 18 lakh acres of forest land and issue land ownership rights to farmers cultivating on bagair hukum land for years.
He said that the successive governments had not implemented the recommendations of the A.T. Ramaswamy committee, which had recommended creation of a legal authority to take appropriate action against land grabbers.
He accused the officials of the Revenue and Forest departments of trying to evict poor farmers cultivating government land for more than 40 years. Mr. Manpade said that more than 12 lakh applications submitted by farmers to the Land Grant Committees for regularisation of revenue land they were cultivating had been rejected. About seven lakh applications are pending. Around 46 lakh farmers are cultivating bagair hukum land in the State, he added.
KPRS district president Sharanabasappa Mamshetty urged the government to introduce necessary amendments to the Karnataka Land Revenue Act and Forest Rights Act to expedite the process of giving ownership rights to bagair hukum farmers over the land being cultivated by them.
