Tk 6m tourist project pits Garos against Forest Department in Madhupur

According to the Forest Settlement Act of 1927, the Madhupur tract, commonly known as Shalban, had roughly 49,726 hectares of land, and the Bangladesh government later declared approximately 23,555 hectares of these lands as protected forest.

As a farming community, Garos rely on those soils, adjacent to their habitats that are mostly within the boundaries of the Madhupur National Park, as their major source of food and earnings.

At the moment, 13 such Garo families are on the verge of losing their rights to those lands as the Forest Department plans to make an artificial lake there as a tourist attraction.

When bdnews24.com reached out to those families, they claimed that they inherited those lands from their ancestors and are in possession of respective paper works, which they believe would supersede any claims made by the Forest Department in a court of law.

The Forest Department has a one-liner in response: “Those lands do not belong to the Garo community.”

WHAT’S THE PROJECT?

The Tk 6 million project, titled ‘Development of ecotourism and sustainable management in Madhupur National Park with the assistance of local and small ethnic groups', is essentially erasing the cultivation rights of the Garos on 6.020 hectares of land, located between Dokhla and Chuniya villages, locally known as the ‘baid’ of Amtali.

Baid in Garo vernacular means low-lying lands.

To establish its supremacy, the department banned entry to that piece of land by declaring it a ‘restricted forest’ on Apr 22 this year, and by the time this bdnews24.com reporter visited the area, signs of under-construction project works were already there.

The project includes developing an arboretum, a two-storey guesthouse, an underground reservoir, and boundary walls, according to the department officials.

A PERFECT STORM IS BREWING?

Different Garo rights organisations are piling on the pressure on the department, and have declared that they will thwart the project whatever it costs.

They are saying the project violates the United Nation’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Labour Organisation Convention.

“Under no circumstances will we Garos allow a lake to be built on our farmlands,” said Liyang Richil, the general secretary of Garo Student Federation, or GSF, central committee.

Even people from other small ethnic groups joined in the protest against the project.

“All Garos in Madhupur, along with people from Koch tribe, are in this fight. Although the Kochs have no rights over those lands, but they are forest-centric people like us and they are also victims of eviction in the name of such development projects,” Richil said.

One of the owners of the disputed lands is Koushallya Nokrek. Garos are a matriarchal society, and that is why women such as Koushallya are considered as the prime claimants of lands as an inheritance.

The mother of six children, Koushallya said their rights over these lands had been established long before the Bangladesh government declared the area a protected forest.

She also has records of taxes she paid decades ago.

“We've paid taxes for these lands until 1982. Since the Ershad era [when military dictator HM Ershad ruled Bangladesh as its president] in 1984, the authorities had stopped collecting taxes from us,” she said.

“These are our lands. The ranger in Dokhla wanted to compensate us. Even the DC [deputy commissioner] of Tangail told us that he will arrange a compensation of Tk 5 lakh [Tk 500,000] for those lands. We don’t want compensation. We want our lands back.”

A local Garo leader, Ajay A Mri, laid out historical references of how these lands came into possession of the Garo community.

“We had been paying taxes for these lands to local Zamindars [historical reference of landlords] long before the colonial era. In the 19th century, our head of the villages struck a deal with Maharaja Jagadindra Nath Roy Bahadur, the king of Natore, and we had started paying taxes to the king,” he said.

“However, as soon as the whole forest was registered as a national park [Madhupur National Park], the authorities had stopped collecting land taxes from us.”

Rafiq Ahmed Siraji, a counsel for Association for Land Reform and Development, believes the Forest Department cannot kick off a project without first settling the issues marking the total areas of Shalban and how much land the ethnic group owns within the area.

“The Supreme Court established the rights of forest-based people in a 2019 verdict. The court also directed the authorities to mark the areas of Shalban according to two gazette notifications -- one was issued in 1956 and the other in 1984,” he said.

"So, any development project without the issues mentioned in the verdict being resolved will be considered as a deviation from the court’s directives,” Rafiq Siraji added.

DEPARTMENT DEFIANT, ADMINISTRATION NONCHALANT

The Forest Department said it will not back off from the project.

An official of the department believes the affected Garo families do not even qualify for compensation.

“We [the department officials] went to every house in the area, and did our best to make them understand that they should not obstruct a development project initiated by the government,” Dokhla Range Officer Islamil Hossain said.

Md Ataul Gani, the district’s deputy commissioner, appeared to have lost interest in a peaceful solution to the problem.

When he spoke with bdnews24.com, he said: “Both sides [the forest department and the Garo families] are claiming they have the rights over the land. I offered the Garo families a Tk 5 lakh [Tk 500,000] compensation to find a resolution. I don’t think there is anything left to discuss anymore.”

[Writing in English by Adil Mahmood; editing by Biswadip Das]