On Caste and Land

Dhaniram Kushwaha

From the book An Open Market for Informal Workers: The Precarious Labour Chowks of Delhi

We met Dhaniram Kushwaha at the Sarai Kale Khan labour chowk. Many of the workers we met there listed chakbandi (land consolidation) as one of the reasons for them having to migrate. To understand the act and the process more deeply, we decided to visit Dhaniram’s village in Lalitpur.

The Uttar Pradesh Consolidation of Holdings Act (1952), and The Uttar Pradesh Consolidation of Holdings (Amendment) Act (1970), known as the Uttar Pradesh Chakbandi Act, were enacted to ensure the consolidation of agricultural holdings for the development of agriculture. According to these laws, a committee has to be formed with the agreement of the Gram Sabha to proceed with the chakbandi in any region. As per Dhaniram and many others from the Kushwaha community, this process is nothing but an exercise through which the land-owning caste accumulates the most productive land in a village.

Dhaniram is a Kushwaha from Malakhedi village, in the Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh. The caste system shapes much of village life, and the Kushwahas traditionally work as farmers and agricultural labourers. However, Dhaniram explains that through the chakbandi process, large portions of land tended by marginalized castes, including Kushwahas, have ended up consolidated in the hands of dominant castes like the Thakurs and Yadavs.

He tells us that while the state promises to redistribute land equitably after consolidation, the reality is different. Members of the Gram Sabha are often from dominant castes who influence the committee’s decisions, and the redistribution rarely benefits lower castes or landless people.

In his own village, Dhaniram says, the more fertile and irrigated land often goes to the landlords, while the Kushwahas and other lower castes end up with less productive parcels. Many families have sold their land to manage debts, while others have entirely lost ownership through the land consolidation processes.

Furthermore, the landless and marginalized communities, including Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, are excluded from the benefits promised by the act, because they lack formal ownership documents. This exclusion fuels migration to cities, as agriculture becomes unsustainable for these groups.

Dhaniram frames this land consolidation not as an empowering agricultural reform but as a mechanism of caste-based dispossession and economic marginalization, forcing many to seek work in urban informal sectors like the labour chowks.

⁸ Interview taken in October 2019