Sarita Devi, Ram Achal, Subedar, Lodar Gaur and more than 25 other villagers in Azamgarh have lost their land to the Purvanchal Expressway and received no compensation, allegedly because the government has discovered that plots it had allotted to needy families years ago were forest land.The six-lane expressway, announced in 2015 and opened in 2021, runs 340.824 km from Lucknow to Ballia district and has cut travel time for commuters. It was built by the Uttar Pradesh Expressway Industrial Development Authority, which acquired a total of 4,377 hectares for the purpose across nine districts.Some of this land was taken from families such as Sarita Devi’s, who had been allotted small plots by the state government for sustenance because they were landless. Gram sabhas can recommend allocation of panchayat land to the needy. The recommendation goes to the lekhpal at the tehsil level, and then to the sub-divisional magistrate, with whose consent sarkari patta (land title) is granted to landless or marginal farmers.Under the Land Acquisition Act, sarkari patta holders are entitled to compensation. However, when land was acquired for the expressway, more than 25 families in Azamgarh holding sarkari patta were given nothing in return. Most were Dalits or from the Other Backward Classes and depended on this land for their livelihood.Sarita Devi was among them. Her father had received three acres in Imli Mahua village about 30 years ago. The family had since tilled the land for food and income. Now, the plot has been taken back and they are landless once again, reduced to daily wage workers from farmers. Sarita and her husband together earn less than Rs 10,000 a month.Subedar, 60, a resident of Gokhwal village in Phulpur tehsil, has a small tobacco and cigarette shop that stands in front of a plot he had received from the government and which he used to till. Now the expressway runs through the plot.“Hum apni zameen bachaane ke liye sabse zyada lade lekin na hi apni zameen bacha sake aur na hi hame koi muavza mila (I fought hard but could neither save my land nor received any compensation),” Subedar says.The loss has impacted his mental health, and he is mostly confined to the bed, unable to run his shop properly. The family now depends on the daily wages Subedar’s son Ram Bharose earns as a labourer. “Mera aur parivar ka jeevanyapan mushkil ho gaya hai,” Subedar says. “Survival has become difficult for us.”Asked why no compensation was given to farmers holding sarkari patta, an official from Phulpur tehsil who requested anonymity cited the Supreme Court’s Hinch Lal Tiwari v. Kamala Devi judgment. In this judgment, the court had ruled that material resources of the community, such as forests, tanks, ponds, hillocks and mountains, are nature’s bounty that should be protected and could not be allotted or commercialised. Since the land distributed had been found to be forest land, the allocation was illegal and therefore not eligible for compensation, the official said.A part of the highway near the affected villages. Photo: Raj ShekharHowever, Azamgarh’s small and marginal farmers were given the land by the government and have been cultivating it for decades. The Uttar Pradesh land archive records (Bhulekh) still show the names of these farmers against their respective plot numbers. Several questions arise:How was this land, obtained as a sarkari pattadecades ago, classified as forest land now?If the government overlooked the fact that it was distributing forest land and did not realise its mistake all these years, should the poor farmers lose their livelihood for a mistake they had not made?Doesn’t acquiring a farmer’s land and not paying compensation violate the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013?How is a six-lane expressway on forest land better than the agricultural use of land by marginal farmers?The lekhpal declined to answer these questions, arguing that he had been transferred to the post after the land acquisition and was not in a position to comment.If families possessing sarkari patta are kept out of the safety net of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, it would raise serious questions about the effective implementation of the law and indicate it is skewed to favour land owners over sarkari pattaholders who are among the most marginal farmers. The two different battles for compensation reflect this divide.Landowners who have received compensation but are unhappy with the circle rate at which it was awarded have gone to court to get it enhanced. These cases are being heard in the tribunal court set up at Gorakhpur, 110 km from Phulpur tehsil.Farmers who had sarkari patta and have been denied any compensation are fighting for their land rights at the commissionerate at Azamgarh, a quasi-judicial forum headed by the divisional commissioner to decide such cases.Lodar Gaur, a resident of Raida in Phulpur tehsil who received no compensation for his sarkari patta and is among the farmers fighting for justice for the past eight years, said the slow pace of hearings in the commissionerate is wearing them out and making them lose hope. “Commissionerate me sunwai tez na hone se nyay milna mushkil lag raha hai aur ye hamein haar maanane par majbur kar raha hai,” Lodar said.The eastern Uttar Pradesh region, including Azamgarh district, had witnessed a resistance against the zamindari system between the 1920s and 1960s. Communist and socialist movements in this region played a significant role in transforming farmers’ conception of social justice in the form of demand for land rights. Popular struggles were held in the 1980s and 1990s too. All of these paved the way for sarkari patta being granted to the most marginalised farmers, making ‘land to the tillers’ a reality. The allocation of sarkari patta, a practice that has been continuing in these parts for at least 50 years, contributed to allaying caste-based discrimination.Now, however, the efforts to bring justice and equity into agriculture are being swept aside in the process of bringing new development projects. The construction of the Purvanchal Expressway is one such example that has pushed many families into landlessness or poverty. The families that have lost their land face food insecurity, and have been robbed of their livelihood. The irony is that it is the administration, which is responsible for protecting the poor and which through grant of pattas had helped them sustain themselves, that is behind their extreme economic hardship now.Ram Achal, also from Imli Mahua village, said his family had received land from the government in the 1970s, before his birth. Many years were invested into turning the barren land productive, after which the family began to get a good foodgrain produce. They willingly gave up their land for the expressway, Ram Achal said, believing they were contributing to nation-building, but are feeling betrayed after they were denied compensation.Ram Achal has not lost all his sarkari patta land. Some of it has not been acquired for the expressway, but they are not cultivating this land either for fear of it being taken over by the government.The fear of losing land once again is keeping several other families who were denied compensation from accepting the authorities’ offer to use some of the remaining gram sabha plots in their villages. Most of this land is barren and will require years of work to make it cultivable, the villagers said, and there is no guarantee it will not be taken from them as has happened now.Tez Bahadur Yadav, the lawyer representing Subedar at the commissionerate, says the patta holders have a strong case and deserve compensation. “The government has declared these as forest land and we are trying to prove that these were cultivable lands that farmers have tilled for so many years,” he said.Raj Shekhar is an Uttar Pradesh-based researcher working on the issues of land, labour and human rights.