IIn late November 2024, the Haryana Legislative Assembly amended the Haryana Village Common Lands (Regulation) Act 1961 to allow certain categories of Shamilat deh under squatting to be converted into private ownership through gram panchayat payment, a framework further streamlined and expanded in 2025 by shifting approval powers and market restrictions. The government is pitching it as an administrative settlement to reduce litigation, recover value for panchayats and resolve long-standing common cause disputes in revenue courts. He argues that extensive residential and agricultural encroachment made a negotiated buyout preferable to protracted legal battles.
The question after a year is not only whether the amendment erases, but what rural order it consolidates. Common lands are a political institution that shapes livelihood security, bargaining power in rural markets, and the dependence of the landless. If ability to pay becomes the operative criterion for title, regularization risks turning de facto ownership into de jure ownership in ways that confirm elite capture rather than remedy it.
Commons and power
This risk must be read from Haryana’s longer history of Shamilat deh rule and exclusion of Dalits, where intervention is rarely accidental. Fieldwork on village plots (Sucha Singh Gill, Pramajit Judge, Manjit Singh) and K. Gopal Iyer’s synthesis document how Dalits have been systematically denied “due rights” to communal land, with interventions often maintained through patronage, sarpanch and official complicity, and unequal access to paperwork and coercion. This is not just a scientific statement.
A 2007 Haryana Institute of Rural Development (HIRD) study of Bhiwani and Karnal districts noted outsiders benefiting from village common land, panchayats denying Dalit families access to cultivable plots, and Dalit households failing to realize legal shares because they could not compete with dominant landowners in rental markets. He further noted that roughly 15% of interventions by dominant landowners had the support of sarpanches, officials or politically influential persons, while wealthier households gained disproportionate benefits by offering higher rents.
Capture scale
The same HIRD exercise provides a sense of range. Out of 2,01,875 acres of cultivable Shamlat land, 28,628 acres were reported as encroaching, representing 14.18% of the cultivable land. It also collected administrative data on 8,270 cases filed between 1994 and 1995 for illegal possession of 21,137 acres of Shamlat land. The main point is the trend line: in 2009-2010, the number of encroachment cases pending in the tax courts reportedly reached 19,476, about 2.35 times more than in 1994-95. These numbers make it clear what is at stake. When intervention is structurally produced and politically protected, the proposal to “pay for legalization” predictably favors those with liquidity, paper capacity, and social networks.
Field agrarian political economy from Haryana reinforces this broader diagnosis. Agrarian life is stratified by land and caste, while landless Dalit households remain concentrated in precarious wage labor and marginal self-employment, critically dependent on access to basic social security. such as the public distribution system. In such a setting, regularization through payment is not a neutral technique. It can shrink the already limited spaces that provide marginalized households with a measure of autonomy from dominant landowners, while stabilizing the gains of those who can convert ownership into formal title.
The state’s reasoning is understandable; Litigation is costly and decades-long occupations create insecurity, constrain panchayat planning and reduce revenue. However, technocratic settlement is not distributionally neutral. By treating the problem as a backlog rather than a continuing pattern of expropriation, the amendment risks normalizing encroachment and translating that normality into ownership through payment. It is a political choice about who deserves municipal property, even if it is framed as administrative efficiency.
The contrast with policies elsewhere clarifies the normative hinge. Restitutionary frameworks treat common or specially reserved lands as remedial tools to cushion the landless and historically oppressed, and some states have taken this logic quite seriously. Madhya Pradesh’s initiative to distribute a large portion of charnoi land to Dalits is a clear example. Panchami lands in Tamil Nadu were similarly reserved for Dalits, reflecting an express assumption of protection rather than treating common property as a tradable asset. In contrast, in purchase-oriented frameworks, the commons becomes a tradable asset allocated through the willingness and ability to pay. Haryana’s amendment leans toward this second logic: without first addressing historical entitlement, caste deprivation, and the statutory intent of the commons as a social safety net, it risks conferring malikana haq while leaving underlying injustice untouched.
The policy of visibility is also embedded in the regularization. Policies of this kind are often presented as administrative administration and marginalized groups are expected to accept settlement as “practical”. Yet a study of Kanshi Ram’s “counter-diplomacy” highlights the broader tendency of caste to deviate from the official framework, even as Dalit claims persist. In the context of the commons, the implication is direct; without transparency and institutionalized modes of dispute, formal legality can be achieved at the cost of deeper illegality.
A more honest design would ensure that regularization does not become a conveyor belt for elite capture. Titles should follow mandatory socio-economic and caste profiling with panchayat-level disclosure and privacy protection and a hierarchy of entitlements consistent with statutory intent, including priority for landless and historically excluded groups. Ecologically and socially critical common objects should be excluded from the transformation. The process should be independently audited, with credible grievance redressal separate from local management discretion. Finally, revenues should be earmarked for distributional repairs, and case resolution should be time-bound and linked to legal aid so that marginalized claimants are not rewarded while better-resourced residents settle disputes with payment.
Justice or order
The 2024 amendment thus crystallizes a broader tension in current rural governance: land policy as social justice versus land policy as administrative order. In a rural political economy structured by caste and unequal access to livelihood diversification, legalizing encroachment without first correcting structural inequality is not the only solution to disputes. It is the state that chooses a solution in a long-term social conflict and calls it efficiency.
Anand Mehra is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. Vignesh Karthik KR is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at King’s India Institute, King’s College London
Published – 1 Jan 2026 22:34 IST
