“I am 60 years old and I must have visited the collector and other administrators’ offices at least 95 times, requesting them to provide us basic living conditions and our legal rights. But all my efforts were in vain,” Acchelal Musahar, a resident of Bahuarwa Musahar Toli in the Bagaha division of Bihar’s West Champaran district, told me. The century-old village is a small settlement of about two hundred fifty ramshackle one-room houses that accommodate around five hundred families, and all of them hail from the Musahar community. The Musahars are a Dalit sub-caste, classified as Mahadalits in Bihar, and treated as one of the lowest castes in the social hierarchy. The hamlet, crammed into an area of barely 3.5 acres, is part of an almost 4,500 acres spread owned by the Harinagar Sugar Mill. “The previous mill owners forced my ancestors into bonded labour and didn’t allow them to migrate,” Acchelal said. “The new owners, they pay us a meagre amount and some of us move to the cities, that is the only change. The mill owners have forced residents to stay here across generations in extreme poverty.”
Every resident of the settlement is employed in the farms surrounding the sugar mill, barring the few who managed to migrate. All the residents are illiterate and unskilled, and consequently do mostly manual labour on abysmally low wages. Some families are still bonded to the mill owners. The residents told me that the mill owners did not pay even basic wages, employed under-age children, and exploited them at every chance. Acchelal said, “Every now and then the houses collapse. We have no health, education, sanitation and other facilities.” But the mill owners and successive administrations have ignored the residents’ plight, and they continue to subsist on bare minimum wages and appalling living conditions.
On 1 November, the prime minister Narendra Modi addressed an election rally just across the road from Bahuarwa. The Bharatiya Janata Party is part of the ruling coalition in the state, headed by the Janata Dal (United) and led by Nitish Kumar. Modi was campaigning for the last phase of Bihar’s assembly elections, including West Champaran, which were held on 7 November. Raghav Sharan Pandey was the BJP’s legislator from Bagaha. However, in these elections the BJP dropped him and fielded Ram Singh instead. Madan Musahar, who attended the rally, told me, “Modi promised land to the landless people of Champaran if voted to power. It’s bewildering that the MLA is from his party but in the past five years, the MLA never told him of the denial of land rights just 400 metres from his rally spot?”
Madan was referring to the fact that Bahuarwa’s residents are all landless and the mill’s owners have ensured that they remain so. Acchelal told me that the current mill owner, Vivek Madhavlal Pittie, and his ancestors acquired this land illegally over the years, and that some of the land rightfully belongs to Bahuarwa’s residents. Prakash, a land-rights activist who has worked in the region for decades, corroborated Acchelal’s claims. The land acquired by the mill owners’ over the years is agricultural land which should have been redistributed among a scattered population of villagers as per the Bihar Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling Area and Acquisition of Surplus Land) Act, 1961. Prakash told me that the villagers’ rightful claims over the land have been “cunningly side-tracked” by the mill’s owners due to the complicated nature of the land reform act. According to a 2017 order of the Court of Land and Revenue Department, West Champaran, successive owners, including Pittie, have illegally accumulated a surplus 4,293 acres located on this stretch of the National Highway 21 across four blocks in the district—Bagaha 1, Bagaha 2, Ramnagar and Gaunaha.
In addition, the locals’ houses were built in 1985 under the Indira Awas Yojana, or IAY, a central government housing scheme, now known as the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana. According to the Bihar Privileged Persons Homestead Tenancy Rules, 1948, if a person has a residence on agricultural land and has lived in it for over a year, they have the right of ownership on that land once it is approved by the local department of revenue and land reform. In 2009, certain IAY beneficiaries were brought under the homestead act. Prakash told me that the residents’ papers establishing their homestead rights on Bahuarwa’s land were currently with the department of revenue and land reform, in Ramnagar. When I called the present circle officer of the department, VK Mishra, he told me, “Whoever has made this claim that the papers are lying with me should come and meet me after the elections.”
The lack of political will to guarantee land rights and proper housing was a consistent grudge of everyone I spoke to in Bahuarwa. To most residents it did not matter who was in power as no politician has ever helped them with their claims to the land, their living conditions or even provision of basic facilities like water, education and health services. For instance, there is just one hand pump for 45 families and not a single functional public toilet. The residents defecate in the open. Several residents asked why Modi came so near to Bahuarwa, delivered a speech with promises for people like them but left without looking into their issues. Basmati Devi, a 75-year-old widow who lives alone in a one-room house, said, “I hear pradhan mantriji spent at least a crore or even crores on his rallies to woo voters from Champaran. Had he spent even a miniscule amount from that money to rebuild our houses or to improve our living conditions, I would have at least died in peace seeing my people living what’s called a decent life.”
The other objects of ire were the mill’s owners and its management. Banai Manjhi, another resident, told me, “Here, each person who is capable of working is asked by the mill owners to work for long hours for the sugar mill on the farm.” He continued, “We are paid something. Hence, technically, we are not bonded labourers. Yet, we are the unspoken slaves of Haringar Mills.” Banai said that they had no union, and “the government’s per day wages are not a right beyond where the mill’s farmlands begin.” Guddu Kumar, a 30-year-old who works as a driver for the mill, told me something similar. “I must be the best paid among all Toli residents. I get Rs 260 per day against the average wage of Rs 120 to Rs 150 that most receive.”
The wages are even worse for the women who are paid Rs 80 to Rs 100 per day. All of this is in direct contravention of the state’s rules for minimum per day wage limit for unskilled workers, which is pegged at Rs 268. The worst off though, are the children—not only are they illegally employed and kept away from education, they are paid a meagre Rs 80 a day. I met about six girls from Bahuarwa as they returned from work for their lunch break. While most of them looked too exhausted to talk, one 13-year-old agreed to talk to me. “They never pay us anything beyond Rs 80 per day even though we work for 11 hours with just one break in between,” she told me. “Even boys don’t go to school here.” According to her, “If one wants to eat, one has to complete a work day irrespective of age. Each person living here is a pair of hands to work for the sugar mill manager. We live in extreme poverty—the kind you can never imagine.”
Guddu told me that it was impossible for them to educate their children. “It’s true that with all residents being illiterate here, quite a few don’t know the value of education,” he said. “But many who want their children to study to liberate them from such living conditions face one major hurdle. The nearest school is across the highway and no parent can leave work to drop and pick up their children due to the strict timings imposed by the mill supervisor.” He said that the average adult worked from 8 am to 8 pm so helping their children even reach school was out of the question.
The low wages ensured that the residents’ quality of life was equally low. Most of the houses are no bigger than 8 by 10 square feet in area. All the houses were in an extremely dilapidated condition, with layers peeling off the walls and cracked roofs. Chanda Devi, a resident with six children, had a narrow escape recently when her house’s roof fell while the whole family was inside. She moved in with her brother-in-law’s family. “Now, 11 of us, including bhaiya’s family, sleep in such a small room, with our belongings.” Chanda had also lost a child to pneumonia one winter—her child was one of six children who died that winter in Bahuarwa since the residents could not afford to buy enough winter clothes or medicines. If someone falls seriously ill, the locals have to go to the Bettiah town, 46 kilometres away. Just the auto fare for that journey is up to Rs 700—a resident’s entire weekly earning.
The residents also told me that several times the manager from the mill would ask them to take portions of rice instead of wages and would then deduct the price of rice the next time he paid them wages. Amit K Singh, an activist from the Lok Sangharsh Samiti, an NGO that works for the rights of the poor, said, “We have done surveys of Bahuarwa Toli on several occasions. It’s a common practice there. The manager is among the worst oppressors we have seen in Bihar. He sells them bad quality rice instead of paying wages. Maybe, he gets it for free from some supplier who failed to sell it. He compels the workers to take the rice as such poor people don’t have a choice when wages are denied. Later, he charges them Rs 25 for each kg of it.” When I tried to talk to the manager Madan Singh, the residents stopped me and said that my presence will create trouble for them. When I called up Singh, he refused to talk.
Banai told me, “We are so helpless that we are compelled to force our children to live in the same hell we lived in all our lives, stacked into dark, dingy, extremely congested houses like cattle.” Most residents, across age groups, told me that their land papers have been lost by now, though they grew up listening to stories about planting crops and exercising rights on parts of the land which is now known as “Bahuarwa farmland” of the “mill owners.” However, Acchelal still had his land papers which had the words “Bihar Bhoodan Yagna Committee” written on them. The committee was one of several set up under the Bihar Bhoodan Yagna Act, 1954 which created the legal framework for redistribution of land.
Guddu also reiterated Acchelal’s assertions. “The right on this land is ours. In my knowledge, we are entitled to seek redistribution of at least 12 acres of it. But we are accommodated on only one-fourth of our claimed land.” Several residents believed the land claim of the entire population would be much more than 12 acres but they would never know. Many of them have moved several times within a radius of three kilometres, most lack documents and some land has been lost due to construction by the mill owners.
Most of the residents were extremely scathing of the National Democratic Alliance government in Bihar. They told me that the only relief they received from the government during the COVID-19 pandemic was six kilograms of free rations. However, at least 80 residents did not even get that due to flaws in the public distribution system or a lack of the requisite identity cards. Madan and some of his friends told me that their key demand from the government this election was for their land rights and an increase in work days under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005. Pandey, the legislator, did not answer my calls.
Basmati Devi did not hold out much hope even after the current elections. “Imagine, even at this age I work for seven hours each day on the farm to stay alive.” She added, “I have spent my entire life seeing oppression, bonded labour and deprivation. Nobody even fights in the Toli anymore. The only challenge here is to be able to survive.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a 2017 order of the Bihar Land Tribunal ruled that successive owners have illegally accumulated land on the National Highway 21.
The order was of the Court of Land and Revenue Department, West Champaran, Bihar.
The Caravan regrets the error.