Possession of khas lands is in a sorry state. These vacant lands, being state property, are being grabbed in different parts of the country with the local administration allegedly turning a blind eye to it. In many cases, they also collude with the politically and economically powerful quarters at the local level to lease out such lands, flagrantly flouting the government's policy. A press conference was held in Dhaka Sunday to highlight even gender discrimination in allotment of khas lands. Speakers there called for reforming the discriminatory law immediately to lease out such lands also to the extreme poor women for alleviating their poverty. They pointed out that rural women spend around 53 per cent of their working hours in agriculture and industry sectors. But they are facing discrimination in terms of access to recognition, entitlement to resources and access to supports. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) statistics, cited in the news conference, women in Bangladesh owned 3.5 per cent of the total agricultural land in 1993. Twenty years later, it has come down to 2.0 per cent only.
The existing policy clearly excludes poor and ultra poor women from getting khas lands. The law says that only widowed and abandoned women with an able son are eligible for such land. It means that women who have daughters and are without able sons are excluded from the list. Studies have found that khas land can play an effective role in reducing poverty if these are distributed among all the landless at 50 decimal per family. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) has estimated landlessness at 12.84 per cent now, which was 10.18 per cent in 1996 and 8.67 per cent during 1983-84 period. On the other hand, most of the country's five million acres of khas and wet lands, according to a survey by a Parliamentary Committee on Land, are now under illegal occupation.
Experts think if the government distributes khas lands among the landless, it could reduce poverty to a substantial extent. According to official statistics, a sizeable section of the total population is landless now. Many factors including, among others, land erosion, price hike and unemployment have been contributing to the acceleration of the number of the landless. Each landless family should get up to 0.55 acre of cultivable land, suggested an economist who has been doing research on khas land in Bangladesh.
This is because monthly income sources of poor families, which have received khas lands, have been found to be diversified. Additional income received from agricultural production can now be invested in other economic activities like poultry, dairy farming or small business endeavours. The government records have also shown a positive relationship between land ownership and increased spending on food, education and health. Thus, an important step in ensuring pro-poor growth through minimising income disparity will be to establish the extreme poor people's ownership of, or entitlement to, assets and means of production - like khas lands and other capital assets.
It is now time for the authorities to recover khas lands from illegal occupation and distribute those among the genuine landless. This will definitely raise their incomes to a level that would help them overcome extreme poverty. A mechanism should be developed to strictly monitor the compliance by the upazila and the district administration with the government guidelines about distribution of khas lands. Also there is a need for an amendment to the law that excludes ultra-poor women from getting khas lands.
