MUNUND GRAM PANCHAYAT Vs. STATE OF GUJARAT

JUDGEMENT

(1.) How a duly constituted Gram Panchayat can thwart the action of the State Government to allot portion of land to rural landless labourers belonging to Scheduled Caste and Backward Classes of society by a protracted litigation is best reflected by this petition under Article 226 of the Constitution of India filed by Munund Gram Panchayat. The third respondent a registered co-operative society of rural landless Harijan labourers through its Chairman Hemabhai Makwana has with crusaders zeal fought the litigation twice upto the High Court and even upto Supreme Court but in vain.

(2.) India is predominantly an agricultural country. According to the 1981 Census nearly 525.4 million people out of the total population of 685.14 lived in rural area. Further out of 180.5 million people who constituted the entire labour force in 1971 about 125.8 million i.e. 70.8 per cent of the total work-force were employed in cultivation and agricultural occupations. Agriculture in its broad connotation accounts for approximately fifty per cent of our national income. According to the Central Statistical Organisation the net national product generated in India in 1977-78 was estimated to be Rs.30621 crores and the number of workers on the land (including land-holders and landless) was 192.43. But in spite of this agriculture labour occupies the lowest rung of the rural ladder. Social stratification in a village is linked with land and caste which governs status economic power and political influence as much as the level of living which is their consequence. Owner-cultivators with large holdings are at the apex. A major part of the assets in rural areas are concentrated in a few hands. For example in 1971 the top 30% of the rural population claimed nearly 82% of the total assets and within this group the first 10% monopolised as much as 51% of the total assets. On the other hand the lowest 10% per cent possessed a more 0.1 per cent of the assets and the lower 30% to be counted with a 2% share. The distribution of agricultural holdings the small and marginal farmers who constituted over 70% of the land-holders operated barely 24% of the agriculture land. Agricultural labour is provided mostly by economically and socially backward sections of people viz. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes. The very fact that they have continued deficit budgets prove that they are not gainfully employed. They do not spend lavishly rather they spend in Bihar nearly 90% of their income on food. Poverty is the greatest economic evil in welfare state. Agricultural labour who constitutes about one-fifth of the rural work force is the poorest of the poor in India. Fifty per cent of the agricultural labour households are landless and have no assets base. The landless labourers are suffering from a compounded problem of unemployment low and uncertain income and nutritional deficiencies.

(3.) The position of rural poor and their low income is simply the numerical expression of a series of multiple deprivations that taken together add up to lives that are hardly worth-living. These are people with poor land little and or no land people with not enough work people on inadequate diets people with perpetual illness people without the most basic knowledge and skills to improve their lives. They are people who have been denied the right to develop their full human potentials. Justice Bhagwati summarised the position of rural poor and the constitutional safeguards to remedy unjust inequality in the following words : The large majority of our people live in rural areas and rural labour constitutes about 80% of the labour force. Rural labour is mostly unorganised and subjected to massive exploitation and injustice. The real problem is how to end this exploitation and injustice to unorganised rural labour ? The problems which the rural labour faces are almost entirely problems arising from poverty ignorance and illiteracy. They are symptomatic of feudal traditional status-oriented inegalitarian and economi-cally backward society marked by extreme poverty of large masses of people and intolerable social and economic inequalities. Our Constitution proclaims equality before the law but to the large millions of our people equality before the law has remained merely a myth or an illusion. There can be no real equality before law unless it is based on social and economic equality but unfortunately in our rural areas paternalism and not egalitarianism is the dominant attitude and a poor man is either your dependent or your enemy but never an independent conscious and assertive individual and hence equality has remained merely a paper declaration. The rural labour is afflicated by stark poverty and one has not to go very far from Delhi in order to see under what inhuman conditions the rural labour lives and works. If only you go to the stone quarries in Faridabad near one of the most popular holiday resorts of the Government of Haryana you will find stone quarry workers living in hovels hardly 4 ft high with roofs made of straw which gives no protection against sun and rain and which one can enter only by going on ones knees and where these poor inhumans live herded together without any wholesome food or clean drinking water and breathe heavily dust-laden air sufficient to infect the lungs with tuberculosis. If you go to the rural areas in some of the States - I need not mention their name you will find landless labourers slaving for their masters from morning till night and receiving a pittance for the work done by them with their soles and bodies mortgaged to their employers. Unfortunately such places abound in some parts of the country and at these places you come face to face with stark naked poverty. Poverty is the greatest injustice from which the poor suffer and it is a source of manifold problems such as ignorance and illiteracy and helplessness and despair which in their turn give birth to innumerable kinds of injustices to the poor. There is no escape for them from their poverty and its concomitant injustices because the socio-economic institutions which are responsible for perpetuating their poverty are protected by the existing legal system and it is very difficult to change the life conditions of the rural poor and to ensure them social justice within the framework of the existing socio-economic structure. The poor are unable on account of their poverty to effectively shape the decisions which affect their lives. The new development strategy holds that the reduction of relative poverty and inequality is essential if absolute poverty is to be quickly eliminated Social justice does not have to be adjourned to a distant future. Growth and justice are both necessary if subhuman conditions are to be eliminated within any forseeable time-span. Dr. Ambedkar Chairman of the Drafting Committee in his last address to the members of the Assembly unmistakably warned :