PPLA Convenes Session at 5th India Land and Development Conference

On the 21st of November 2021, PPLA Partner Center for Sustainable Development at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh convened a session at the 5th India Land and Development Conference. Co-organised by the Center for Land Governance based in Bhubaneswar and Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, the Conference attracted 1300 participants from over 70 countries across the world. PPLA’s session, entitled “Grassroots and Critical Perspectives on Land Administration in Bangladesh” convened project partners and participants to highlight crucial issues concerning land that are often ignored in mainstream discussions of the issue.

Dr Oliver Scanlan from CSD ULAB presented findings from the PPLA research component, highlighting how the pilot digital land survey in Jamalpur Sadar sub-district had largely not succeeded in achieving equity goals relating to gendered and ethnicised exclusion. Dr Bitopi Dutta and Nasrin Siraj presented a comparative study due to be submitted to the PPLA special issue. The presentation discussed areas of similarity and divergence in the plights faced by Indigenous women in the Jaintia Hill, India, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Finally, Mr Bulbul Mankhin and Mr Badhon Chiran, senior staff from PPLA partner Caritas Mymensingh, offered a practitioners’ perspective on addressing the land rights of Indigenous peoples in the Greater Mymensingh region of Bangladesh. This focused on the lessons learned from Caritas’ participatory community land mapping project “ALSA”.

Panel Chair Dr Nivedita Haran, former Additional Chief Secretary to the Government of Kerala and Faculty member at Jawaharlal Nehru presided over a vibrant Q and A. She herself commented on the depressingly familiar trends of gendered exclusion, seemingly common to the very different institutional and administrative contexts of “plainlands” Bangladesh, the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Jaintia Hills in India. There was agreement that this was a very important area for work and collaboration in the future, potentially at the next annual India Land and Development Conference due to be held at the end of 2022, hopefully face to face.