Presentation short abstract

The paper, by looking at ‘Additions’ to Protected Areas as projects of restoration of nature, examines how it disrupts land tenure securing process for local marginal communities and reproduces unequal dynamics of land control in a land deficit region.

Presentation long abstract

Nature conservation projects like Protected Areas have been linked to marginalisation of local communities across the globe through land grab and enclosure. These land grabs alter socio-economic structure of rural societies by turning agrarian land into conservation forests. In this process, it reconfigures landholding dynamics and recreate precarity of marginal groups who have been historically struggling with land control under private landholding regime. The paper attempts to examine this through the case of a peripheral village of Kaziranga National Park & Tiger Reserve in India. The village, Borbeel, engulfed into the peculiar ‘Additions’ of the Park’s area (on paper) is inhabited by a local tribal community who were displaced earlier and resettled there due to river erosions. This community who has historically been at the margins of regional power dynamics, having minimal land control, has been struggling to secure land tenure rights in a land deficit region. The Additions, with eviction threats, disrupt this process and continue the unequal power dynamics of land control between different communities, and between people and corporates. Looking at these ‘Additions’ as nature restoration projects, the paper examines how a non-sedentary agrarian community’s aspirations get entangled between land dispossession, resettlement, land tenuring and nature conservation. It elucidates this entanglement by bringing forth their stories of migration, land occupation, livelihood practice and resistance. The paper argues that restoration of nature becomes an agent in reproducing precarity and inequality of land control for local marginal communities, causing socio-economic distress and reproducing marginality.