From encroachment to legal ownership

In late November 2024, the Haryana Legislative Assembly amended the Haryana Village Common Lands (Regulation) Act, 1961, to permit the conversion of certain categories of Shamilat deh under unauthorised occupation into private ownership through payment to the gram panchayat, a framework further streamlined and expanded in 2025 by shifting approval powers and diluting the market-rate constraint. The government presents this as an administrative settlement to reduce litigation, recover value for panchayats, and resolve long-running disputes over commons pending in revenue courts. It argues that widespread residential and agricultural encroachments have made a negotiated buy-out preferable to protracted legal battles.

A year on, the question is not only whether the amendment clears the docket, but what kind of rural order it consolidates. Common lands are a political institution, shaping livelihood security, bargaining power in rural markets, and dependence for the landless. If the ability to pay becomes the operative criterion for title, regularisation risks converting de facto possession into de jure ownership in ways that validate elite capture rather than correct it.

This risk must be read against Haryana’s longer history of Shamilat deh governance and Dalit exclusion, where encroachment is rarely accidental. Field-based work on village commons (Sucha Singh Gill, Pramajit Judge, Manjit Singh) and K. Gopal Iyer’s synthesis documents how Dalits’ “due rights” on common land have been systematically denied, with encroachment often sustained through patronage, sarpanch and official complicity, and unequal access to paperwork and coercive authority. This is not only a scholarly claim.

A 2007 Haryana Institute of Rural Development (HIRD) study of Bhiwani and Karnal districts recorded outsiders benefiting from village common land, panchayats not enabling Dalit families’ access to cultivable parcels, and Dalit households failing to realise statutory shares because they could not compete with dominant landowners in lease markets. It further noted that roughly 15% of encroachment by dominant landowning communities had the backing of sarpanches, officials, or politically influential persons, while richer households captured disproportionate benefits by bidding higher lease rates.

The same HIRD exercise provides a sense of scale. It reported 28,628 acres under encroachment out of 2,01,875 acres of cultivable shamlat land, constituting 14.18% of the cultivable commons. It also compiled administrative data on 8,270 cases filed between 1994 and 1995 for illegal possession of 21,137 acres of shamlat land. The trend line is the point: by 2009-10, encroachment cases pending in revenue courts reportedly reached 19,476, about 2.35 times the 1994-95 figure. These numbers clarify what is at stake. When encroachment is structurally produced and politically protected, a “pay-to-legalise” design predictably advantages those with liquidity, paperwork capacity, and social networks.

Field-based agrarian political economy from Haryana reinforces this broader diagnosis. Agrarian life is stratified by land and caste, while landless Dalit households remain concentrated in insecure wage work and tiny self-employment and depend critically on basic welfare access. such as the public distribution system. In such a setting, regularisation through payment is not a neutral technique. It can shrink the already limited spaces that provide marginalised households a measure of autonomy from dominant landowners, while stabilising the gains of those who can translate possession into a formal title.

The State’s rationale is intelligible; litigation is costly, and decades-long occupations create uncertainty, constrain panchayat planning, and foreclose revenue. Yet technocratic settlement is not distributively neutral. By treating the problem as backlog management rather than a continuing pattern of dispossession, the amendment risks normalising encroachment and converting that normality into ownership through payment. This is a political choice about who deserves the commons, even when framed as administrative efficiency.

A contrast with policies elsewhere clarifies the normative hinge. In restitution-oriented frameworks, common or specially earmarked lands are treated as corrective instruments to buffer the landless and historically oppressed, and some States have implemented this logic with relative seriousness. Madhya Pradesh’s initiative of distributing a big portion of charnoi land to Dalits is a clear example. Tamil Nadu’s Panchami lands were similarly earmarked for Dalits, reflecting an explicit premise of protection rather than treating the commons as a negotiable asset. In purchase-oriented frameworks, by contrast, the commons become a negotiable asset allocated through willingness and ability to pay. Haryana’s amendment leans toward this latter logic: without first addressing historical entitlement, caste-based deprivation, and the statutory intent of commons as a social safety net, it risks granting malikana haq while leaving the underlying injustice intact.

There is also a politics of visibility embedded in regularisation. Policies of this kind often present themselves as administrative housekeeping, and marginalised groups are expected to accept settlement as “practical.” Yet scholarship on Kanshi Ram’s “counter-diplomacy” highlights a broader tendency for caste to be deflected from official framings even when Dalit claims persist. In the commons’ context, the implication is direct; without transparency and institutionalised avenues to contest, formal legality may be achieved at the cost of deeper illegitimacy.

A fairer design would hardwire safeguards so regularisation does not become a conveyor belt for elite capture. Titles should follow mandatory socio-economic and caste profiling with panchayat-level disclosure and privacy protections, and hierarchy of claims aligned with statutory intent, including priority for landless and historically excluded groups. Ecologically and socially critical commons, should be excluded from conversion. The process should be independently audited, with credible grievance redress insulated from local executive discretion. Finally, proceeds should be earmarked for distributive repair, and case clearance should be time-bound and paired with legal aid so marginalised claimants are not priced out while better-resourced occupants close disputes through payment.

The 2024 amendment thus crystallises a wider tension in contemporary rural governance: land policy as social justice versus land policy as administrative tidiness. In a rural political economy structured by caste and unequal access to livelihood diversification, legalising encroachment without first correcting for structural inequality is not merely dispute resolution. It is the State selecting a settlement in a long-running social conflict, and calling it efficiency.

Anand Mehra is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. Vignesh Karthik K.R. is a postdoctoral research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London