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Dear Girish Thank you for your questions. I shall give you some information but I do not have all of it. More important than the Bengal Tenancy Act is the Permanent Settlement 1793 which was the culmination of the land acts in Bengal. There was massive land alienation in Jharkhand so the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act was passed in 1903 (or is it 1907? I am getting old and am forgetting a few things!) as protection against it. A study done in the 1980s showed that the Act was quite effective in the sense that the tribals of Chotanagpur had an average of 3 acres of land. Unfortunately I do not have the book here at Guwahati and do not remember the author. A study done in 1998 by Basu Mallick on behalf of Indian Social Institute showed some deterioration. That report is available at ISI. The situation seems to have got worse today because the Land Acquisition Act is an overarching Act. So people can be displaced against the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act and the later Santal Parganas Tenancy Act. But things were changing even in the 1990s when we studied six States including Jharkhand. Some commonalities exist among them on the issue of individual land alienation. The Act banning tribal land alienation does not allow sale of tribal land to non-tribals but it does not ban mortgage. As a result, much land is mortgaged. In Telengana around two thirds of tribal land was lost. The loss was less in Jharkhand. Another threat is from within. Secondly, the law does not ban sale of land to other tribals and there is much internal land alienation because of it and that is not against the law unless you are able to apply the December 1997 SC judgement in the Bastar case which says that if a tribal uses his political or economic clout to alienate land from other tribals, he is to be considered a non-tribal. So protection against abuses is minimal but the Jharkhand tribals have been able to protect a little more of their land than their counterparts in the rest of Eastern India have done. But it is only comparative advantage. Yes, I wish I knew where the treasure of K. S. Singh is. His library is probably somewhere in Jharkhand because once he told me that he wanted to donate it to some institution in Jharkhand. In fact, he asked me to identify an institution. Unfortunately at that stage I was in the process of shifting to Guwahati and could not respond to this request. Check in Jharkand and you may find that treasure which is really good. Bye and all the best Walter
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