New Delhi: The Telangana high court on Tuesday, December 6, set aside a resolution passed by a village panchayat in the state’s Bhadradri-Kothagudem district that called for the eviction of the Gutti Koya tribal community.Justice Lalitha Kanneganti questioned the authority of the Bendalapadu village gram panchayat in passing such orders. The resolution had called for ‘driving away’ Gutti Koyas to Chhattisgarh, from where they were forced to migrate in the mid-2000s because of the conflict between the state-sponsored Salwa Judum militia and Maoist groups.The panchayat had passed the resolution in the wake of the killing of forest range officer Ch. Srinivasa Rao in the last week of November. Police had arrested two persons belonging to the Gutti Koya community in connection with the murder. The killing of the forest range officer has resulted in public opinion against the tribal community, and has also brought to the fore the festering issue of ‘podu cultivation’ locally.Led by one Kavasi Hadma, a tribal, three members from the Gutti Koya community moved the high court, opposing the resolution.According to The Hindu, the counsel for petitioners, Chikkudu Prabhakar, sought to know the law under which such a resolution was passed. He clarified that the police had already made arrests in connection with the murder, and there was no point in blaming the entire Gutti Koya community. He also submitted to the court that the Supreme Court had, in several earlier instances, reminded that panchayats do not have such power to issue eviction notices against anyone.The petitioners said that the sarpanch and the panchayat secretary had passed the resolution even without conducting a gram panchayat.The counsel for the petitioners argued that the eviction order violated the Panchayat Raj Act of 2018, Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers Recognition of Forest Rights Act 2006.Although Telangana forest officials claim that the murder was due to disagreements between the forest officer and the accused over cattle grazing, it has brought to the fore the contentious ‘podu’ practice in Telangana once again.Podu cultivation is a traditional form of agriculture that local communities practice in the Eastern Ghats and surrounding areas. As part of this, forests are cleared (often burned down) and people cultivate crops such as millets and vegetables in these patches.After harvests, podu cultivators abandon the land and sometimes return to these patches two or three years later for another cropping season. A state government survey found that as many as 3.95 lakh farmers engaged in podu cultivation in Telangana, per a news report.In a previous report, The Hindu had reported that the eviction notice passed by the panchayat claimed that the Gutti Koyas living in Errabodu are “addicted to ganja and liquor, and tote around fatal weaponry. They are losing discretion and committing murders. They are a threat to the lives of the people of Bendalapadu, who are forced to live in constant fear.”Santhosh Esram, a social worker who runs a school for the Gutti Koya children in Mulugu district, told the newspaper that the community has “always remained reticent” and would flee into forests whenever they were approached by officials.The report says that the Gutti Koya tribe started crossing over from Chhattisgarh around 2005 because they were caught in the crossfire between Salwa Judum and Maoists. “Far from threatening anybody, the Gutti Koya tribals are exploited by the native villagers in the name of land titles and borewells, as they lack state protections,” a researcher, who chose to remain anonymous, told The Hindu.