By Napoleon S Mawphniang
‘3,000 bighas! An entire district for one company?’ This question is not a mere quip; it resonates like a gavel striking the conscience of a region. When the Gauhati High Court posed this question, it was not engaging in theatrics—it was performing triage. In a Sixth Schedule hill district, where land is more than just a commodity but a tapestry of memories woven into the soil, transferring 3,000 bighas to a private cement company is far from an ordinary administrative act; it is an earthquake. The tremors are felt here in Meghalaya too, where the hill’s ancient law—older than any statute—dictates that the land remembers who has tended it and why.
Envision the scenario as it likely transpired in Guwahati: the judicial bench inquiring, the legal counsel affirming, and the courtroom collectively holding its breath.. Subsequently, the inquiries emerged, direct and unembellished: Under what policy? By whose authority? Most critically, by what right can a Sixth Schedule district—explicitly established to protect tribal land and life—be treated as an open ledger for aggressive corporate incursion? The court’s skepticism was not capricious; it was principled. It resonated with the authority of an elder in a village durbar: resolute, factual, and unflinching.
The proponents of the deal employed a familiar lexicon—“barren land,” “investment,” “jobs,” “development.” Yet, anyone who has traversed the slopes of Umrangso understands that the notion of barrenness is an illusion. What appears “unused” to bureaucratic eyes is often a shared commons in reality—grazing grounds, foraging zones, sacred groves, shifting cultivation plots left to rest, and overlapping spaces where wildlife and humans have forged ancient agreements. Even the seemingly “empty” areas resonate with life for those attuned to listen: hot springs, migratory bird stopovers, and water veins nourishing the forest edges. Development that fails to hear this symphony renders itself deaf—and then questions why protests echo like drums.
However, it would be an oversimplification to view this moment merely as a typical conflict between development and conservation. It is more fundamental—a test of whether constitutional commitments hold any significance when money flows freely and memory becomes inconvenient. The Sixth Schedule is not merely decorative; it represents our hill pact: tribal autonomy, land governed by customary systems, and community consent as a prerequisite, not an afterthought. When large tracts of land are appropriated under the guise of investment policy, the Sixth Schedule risks being reduced to a mere suggestion. Fortunately, the High Court refused to comply with such a notion.
The sheer scale should unsettle any democratic sensibility: 3,000 bighas. One parcel today, a cluster tomorrow, and soon the map transforms from a tapestry of living communities into a spreadsheet of concessions. This is how enclosure arrives in modern guise—through MoUs signed in capital cities, through cabinet notes extolling the “ease of doing business,” through narratives of “unlocking potential,” until silence descends where a forest once thrived. People still reside there, of course, but they begin to live around a project rather than within a landscape. They start to seek permission to be themselves.
History offers us dusty warnings. From colonial land acquisition to more recent pro-growth regimes, the failure to recognize people as more than mere beneficiaries often results in the same moral geometry: a straight line of displacement slicing through a circle of life. Audits and inquiries over the decades have revealed how rushed allotments outpace rehabilitation, how public purpose is proclaimed at a podium and paid out in promises that vanish in the sunlight. It is an old tractor in a new field. The tires may be shiny, but they leave familiar tracks.
The company claims the land is barren, while the state argues that the investment will spur progress. Perhaps some of it will. Jobs are important. Roads are essential. A cement bag symbolizes construction just as a stone represents resistance. However, the court wisely chose not to question the ambition but to scrutinize the arithmetic. Three thousand bighas is not mere calibration; it is a form of capture. In a Sixth Schedule district, such large-scale capture can lead to dispossession by stealth. Public interest, therefore, must transcend being a mere slogan on a podium; it must be a method. This method starts with transparent policy: reveal the rule book, the thresholds, the ceilings, the compatibility test with Sixth Schedule protections, the consent minutes, the environmental baselines, and the cumulative impact—not just the fragmented project-by-project narrative, but the entire chorus.
If governance were approached as a craft rather than a performance, clarity would manifest in several ways. First, clearly communicate to the public the criteria used to allocate such a large tract of land in a tribal district, and identify who evaluated these criteria. Second, demonstrate that free, prior, and informed consent was genuinely sought and obtained from communities, not through perfunctory meetings but through thorough deliberative processes, with records as comprehensive as the stakes involved. Third, assess the cumulative impacts across the entire proposed cluster: the effect on water tables, dust on fields, light on birds’ nocturnal paths, traffic on village roads, shifting cultivation cycles, and pressure on common lands—because ecology functions as a network, not a single column. Fourth, make rehabilitation a prerequisite—funded, scheduled, and enforceable—ensuring that lives are not left in limbo while capital speeds ahead. Fifth, establish a clear distinction between mineral rights and territorial control: a mining lease does not equate to a land kingdom.
We in Meghalaya, being children of a similar covenant, should read this case like a mirror. The temptations are the same: to declare fallow what is unfamiliar, to summon “industry” as a magic word absolving sins, to deem consent “obtained” through hasty, selective translation. We must do better. The law gives us the scaffolding; the hill gives us the ethic. Between them, we can build a standard that dignifies both livelihood and enterprise. There is a way forward that replaces cynicism with scrutiny. It begins with authorities treating the court’s questions as an opportunity to disclose, deliberate, and justify. Communities must exercise both veto and design power—accepting specific acreage rather than 3,000 bighas; allowing quarrying with distance limits from hot springs; accepting jobs with training, safety guarantees and appropriate worker housing; demanding audited royalty and development funds; and requiring sunset clauses for unused land. If investment is a bargain, let it be hard on all, especially those who profit. A press must not be dazzled by grand numbers like 3,000. Counter with other metrics: households collecting fuel wood; foraging women; migration patterns; water carried; forest regeneration time. These numbers, absent from cabinet notes, are the ledger of the living.
The court’s role is to keep the contract honest. When it asked if this was “some kind of a joke,” it wasn’t mocking industry but mocking scale without sense. This should be felt as instruction, not insult. It tells the government and company to return with homework done, and tells us to keep reading footnotes, where power hides. For those opposing court involvement in “development”: it’s not intrusion to ask for keys before driving off. The land is a public trust with a constitutional manual. When ignored, the brakes fail at the worst turn.
We have our own tales of disputed concessions, our own files where “barren” attempts to mask “beloved,” and our own tensions between livelihood and ledger. Let this moment refine our tools—policy, consent, assessment, rehabilitation—until they are adept enough to forge a path that neither flattens communities nor stifles opportunities. Development worth pursuing is slow enough to be comprehended and swift enough to be experienced. Anything else is merely a land grab by another name.
The court has demanded transparency: policy, process, proof. This is a reasonable request for a decision of such significance. Should this truth come to light, the project—appropriately sized, wisely limited, and strictly managed—could still achieve legitimacy. If not, then 3,000 bighas will become a cautionary tale in hill folklore, demonstrating how easily we can lose direction when we mistake the map for the terrain, the promise for the plan, and the investment for the future. The hills remain steadfast. The question is whether our institutions will meet the challenge.
(The writer is Advocate , Trade Unionist, Ethicist & the Humanist Architect)