In village after village in the Malwa region, Dalit women have won the right to farm common land. They are now protesting and courting arrest to demand a new casteless settlement: Begumpura.
Dalit women reclaiming Punjab’s farmlands. ‘We have a right to it’
They have already leveraged a 1961 law and turned it into a rallying cry for land, dignity, and ownership. The fire of hakk, or rights, is burning in their bellies. Now, Jasveer and hundreds of other women are part of a fresh agitation to claim 927 acres of unused estate land in Bir Aishwan village. They are marching, protesting, and courting arrest to demand a new settlement: Begumpura, a casteless village imagined by poet-saint Ravidas.
Dalits, who make up about 32 per cent of Punjab’s population, own just 3.5 per cent of the state’s land. Most work as daily-wage labourers through heat waves and biting cold for around Rs 300 a day, planting and harvesting crops they have no claim on.
But then, the Dalits in rural Punjab started fighting back. Their first weapon was a law that Punjab had passed in 1961. Under the Punjab Village Common Lands (Regulation) Act, one-third of village common land—known as panchayat land or shamlat deh— to be allotted to Scheduled Castes or Dalits for agricultural use. On paper, it gave Dalits the right to lease and farm these plots through panchayat auctions. In practice, the land stayed in the hands of dominant castes through dummy bidders and threats.
The first major pushback came in 2008, when Dalit labourers in Benra village, Sangrur, took over panchayat land. In 2014, the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee (ZPSC) began organising across the region, turning scattered protests into a coordinated campaign.
22/07/2025