Goals

To facilitate securing land rights for marginalized and vulnerable communities and groups including, tribal, dalits, landless, pastoralists, small holder farmers and women by empowering them through influencing policy makers, government bodies and other key stakeholders and by creating an enabling policy and social atmosphere to formulate and implement pro-people land and development policies and programs.

Specific/Strategic Objectives

Changes in Agenda :
  • Prioritising the rights and entitlements of other traditional forest dwellers under Forest Rights Act. This will include pastoralists, notified and de-notified tribals and Non Timber Forest collectors on forest land and other common lands
  • FPIC is included in public discourse (CSO, government, and other relevant stakeholders);
Changes in Behaviours / Practice:
  • Ensure that the marginalised communities (particularly amongst women and youth)adaptat to natural and traditional farming technologies and thus ensuring their food and nutrition security ;
  • Fair implementation of ‘Land Ceiling Act’
  • Government proactively promotes and support community led management of resources
  • The communities who have got community forest rights, will start managing Community Forestry Resources under Forest Rights Act;
Changes in Policy Content:
  • Formulation of national people’s policy on commons;
  • ‘Draft Land Reform Policy’ needs to be approved by the Cabinet at national level;
  • Influence the policies on pro-farmer friendly tools and techniques in local, district and state level

Overall Strategies

After three years of implementation of NES India programme on PCLG, the members had rounds of rigorous discussions internally that we need to develop an independent identity under Land Forum India, so that we can establish ourselves at three levels:

  1. Coalition with Strong Mass Mobilization
  2. Knowledge Hub
  3. Multi-stakeholders platform, mostly of civil society organisations, networks, movements, researchers, academicians, media personnel associated with land issues. This platform will regularly collaborate with government on policy issues

All the members have been realizing that to become more inclusive, participatory and open for other stakeholders associated with land issues, it would be strategic to have a banner that is more acceptable by all, thus, after hours of brainstorming, ‘Land Forum India’ was agreed to be this banner.

  • Strengthening NES India, renaming it to ‘Land Forum India’ with open membership, as a national mass movement on land for increasing secure land rights of marginalized communities.

  • Facilitating collective joint action with like minded alliances and networks.

  • Developing identity of Land Forum India from the local level to state level by organizing workshops with local level civil society organisations, alliances and taking the discussion forward from the grassroots level to state level, regional level, and national level.

  • Building a national network around the Commons (currently absent at the national level) by linking social movements, land alliances like Collective of Advancement of Women’s Livelihoods Rights Network (CAWL), academia, Networks, Media and CSO National Policy officials and link with the Call to Action initiative in South Asia for global campaigning. 

  • Establishing few model villages with increased land reform, sustainable land management practices and natural farming practices and working on up-scaling it in collaboration with government and other CSOs.
  • Sensitizing and increasing awareness of people in urban areas, specifically youth, on land and livelihood issues for creating an enabling policy influencing atmosphere through training, regular meetings and interface.
  • Knowledge generation and monitoring (start organizing people data on land governance) by undertaking research on status of land and using the data to monitor land status and for policy advocacy and securing of land rights through people maps
  • Develop the second generation leadership among the marginalized community to take the land movement forward.
  • Building capacity of community leaders, specifically women, Dalits and tribal on different land laws and enabling them to access legal aids like CFR; create strong ground level alliances.
  • Documentation and dissemination of the case stories, collation of community’s demand, research and evidence generation on policy issues.
  • Establishing India Land Forum as a knowledge platform for influencing the political will at the state and national level and strengthening land mass movements in the ground.
  • Influencing land policy decisions through increased dialogue with the policy and opinion makers, and engagement with other key stakeholders.
  • Sensitizing the local level government bodies, engaged on implementation of land laws, on the needs and interest of local marginalized community and train them on gender mainstreaming
  • Preparing policy briefs on priority commitment areas presenting the policy demands of LFI India that could be used by the LFI members for policy advocacy and influencing.
  • Media and advocacy campaigns for a policy on Commons and land reform policy and implementation of forest Rights Act.

The above mentioned components are complimentary. The different members in the platform bring complementary strengths to be able to undertake work at different levels with diverse strategies. For example some members are good in undertaking research and some members are good in mobilizing community. Some members have good connection for policy advocacy. These diverse strengths support effective mobilization of resources for implementing a variety of strategies which in turn builds on the advocacy approaches to influence the policy makers.