Relocation Charade

21 tribal families say forest officials allied with property dealers to dupe them of the money they received for relocating from Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve

- Ishan Kukreti

IT’S A case of lies, deception and dubious land deals. And communities living in the pristine Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu are at the receiving end of it all.

Fifty-something S Kannan, for instance, who belongs to the Paniya tribe, used to live in Pulliyalam village set deep inside the district’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) till September 2018. But fraudulent activities by the officials responsible for a relocation programme from the reserve’s core area have left him squatting on a tiny 14 sq m patch of land outside the forest which he can never own.

As the first instalment, the state government paid Kannan ₹4 lakh to leave his ancestral home inside MTR to create inviolate space for tigers and elephants. But land brokers, in connivance with the forest range officer and an advocate, extracted the amount from Kannan by fraudulently selling him poramboke land in Gudalur block. Poramboke land is common land that cannot be owned by anyone. “They did not tell me this was not their private property,” he says.

Kannan is not the only one cheated. As many as 21 tribal people, looking forward to the relocation programme that would have finally given them land ownership, have suffered a serious setback. Collectively, they have been swindled of ₹2 crore. They filed an fir on September 3, this year, in which Kannan is the main complainant.

But Adivasi Munnetra Sangam, a tribal-led non-profit working in Gudalur, believes the scam has a much bigger magnitude. In January this year, it sent a letter to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes stating that 93 families have been duped of ₹6.70 lakh each.