Abstract
The charland in the riverine flood plain and the delta was historically viewed as isolated and lawless “frontiers,” yet the land was productively used in terms of extension of cultivation through migration and development of new settlements in Bengal. The first legislative enactment by the British colonial rulers—the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Regulation (1825)—aimed at granting out leases of waste land for cultivation in order to raise revenue and settling boundaries of estates with local zamindars to avoid conflicting claims over depositional lands. The regulation itself and subsequent amendments in 1950 (East Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act) and more recent post-independent presidential order of 1972, the ordinance of 1975, and the act of 1994 are a complex set of rules that indeed provoked more conflicts than actually settling ownerships and titles. This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of the legal framework and examines key administrative issues related to charland survey, use and ownerships, and settlement in contemporary Bangladesh. Since erosion and accretion of land and human settlement on such land will continue in the riverine areas of the country, improvements in the existing legal framework, settlement policy, and economic development of the char people remain imperative in the given context. It is argued in this chapter that a paradigm shift is called for in realizing the potentials of development in the charlands of Bangladesh.
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Notes
- 1.
The discussion and analyses presented in this chapter are derived from extensive ethnographic research by Zaman on disasters and displacement in the Brahmaputra-Jamuna floodplain (Zaman 1988). For many years, Zaman’s core research has been on char settlements, economies, and social organizations and how these have historically been shaped by the colonial and post-colonial land tenure systems and administration with regards to alluvial and diluvial land (Zaman 1991). Hossain, a former Settlement and Survey Officer and Deputy Secretary to the Government of Bangladesh, has many years of experience with land laws and administration and lately worked on land acquisition and resettlement issues involving bankline and char lands in the Brahmaputra-Jamuna and Padma floodplains.
- 2.
Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908-1956), one of Bengal’s most prominent writers, narrates the story of a group of poor fishermen of a small village on the bank of river Padma and how they were used by an enigmatic person named Hossain in colonizing an island called Moynar Char off the coast of Noakhali District. This novel was included in UNESCO’s collection of India’s best representative works. The novel was translated into English by Mukherjee (1977), and Painter and Lovelock (1977).
- 3.
The Bangladesh government recently spent over US$300 million to transform this 20-year old uninhabited island char to a secured and planned settlement for relocation of 100,000 Rohingya refugees. The relocation of refugees slowly started in December 2020 despite stiff opposition from international/humanitarian agencies on safety grounds due to periodic tropical cyclones (see Zaman 2019a).
- 4.
However, in some classic texts of ancient India—for example, the Rig-Veda (latter half of second millennium B.C.) and Mahabharata (second century B.C to second century A.D), the country of Vanga is mentioned, which corresponds roughly to the oldest portion of present day Bengal (see Majumdar 1971).
- 5.
First National Char Convention 2015 (Krishibid Institution Bangladesh, Khamar Bari, Farmgate, Dhaka, 6 June 2015).
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Zaman, M., Hossain, M. (2021). The Charland Administration and Governance: Need for a Paradigm Shift. In: Zaman, M., Alam, M. (eds) Living on the Edge. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73592-0_24
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