Common Land Resources Research Articles

CONSEQUENCES OF LOSS OF COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCES IN THE SELECTED BLOCK, DINDIGUL DISTRICT OF TAMILNADU

Common property land resources include grazing ground, community pasture, village forests and woodlots, and village sites, on which the villagers have legal usufructuary rights; these land resources also include all another land formally held by the panchayat or a community of the villages (NSS 54th round). For a collection of data of common land resources de jure and e facto approaches were considered. Forest land resources which are under the jurisdiction of the forest department was also considered as poor dependent rural communities are directly or indirectly dependent on the forest for livelihoods. From the report of NSS 54th round, it is observed that 15% of India’s total geographical area substantially forms a part of common land resources. Consequences of loss of common property resources and depletion of common property resources resulted largely because there was no private cost for using these resources. Privatization of common property resources in the arid zone has invariably meant the conversion of common property resources land into cropland.

English

The present investigation has been done on the basis of qualitative and quantitative data collected from primary sources and explored the land alienation and land ownership status of tribal agricultural labourers. It also investigates how social discrimination aggravates the extent of land alienation and influence the land ownership and access to common property resources among the tribal people. While considering the inter-community disparity in land ownership, Kurichiya community owned more land than Paniya community, whereas, Kattunaikan owned no land and remained landless. Majority of the tribal people, especially women experienced high degree of land alienation. The major methods of land alienation identified were marriage of tribal women with non-tribal men, mortgaging the land by the tribal people to the non-tribal people in return for credit. The major consequences of land alienation as perceived by the tribal agricultural labourers were widening gap between the rich and the poor tribal people, increased poverty, exploitation, confrontation between tribal and non-tribal people, migration, law and order problem in tribal areas and marginalization and exclusion. In the case of access to common property resources, Kurichiya community had better access to community well/ tap, forest produces, common land resources and water resources than Paniya and Kattunaikan communities.

Efficient Patch-Wise Semantic Segmentation for Large-Scale Remote Sensing Images.

Efficient and accurate semantic segmentation is the key technique for automatic remote sensing image analysis. While there have been many segmentation methods based on traditional hand-craft feature extractors, it is still challenging to process high-resolution and large-scale remote sensing images. In this work, a novel patch-wise semantic segmentation method with a new training strategy based on fully convolutional networks is presented to segment common land resources. First, to handle the high-resolution image, the images are split as local patches and then a patch-wise network is built. Second, training data is preprocessed in several ways to meet the specific characteristics of remote sensing images, i.e., color imbalance, object rotation variations and lens distortion. Third, a multi-scale training strategy is developed to solve the severe scale variation problem. In addition, the impact of conditional random field (CRF) is studied to improve the precision. The proposed method was evaluated on a dataset collected from a capital city in West China with the Gaofen-2 satellite. The dataset contains ten common land resources (Grassland, Road, etc.). The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 54.96% in terms of mean intersection over union (MIoU) and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in remote sensing image segmentation.

Impact of Common Land Resources in Sustainable Regional Development: a Geographical Analysis

India is an agricultural country where people’s livelihood is highly dependent upon their land resource. The increasing population has created immense pressure on the land resources of the country, specially the agricultural land. Due to the continuous fragmentation of land in time, the small landholdings have become economically non-viable for the poor farmers. There has been a regular increase in the agricultural inputs over the last decades. Thus, the benefits from agricultural practices have declined in time. In this situation, the marginal and small farmers in general and landless people in particular rely upon the local common land resources (CLR) to supplement their income and earning their livelihood. The CLR, being “accessible” to all and no one having any exclusive right upon them, are generally used in various ways for economic gains. The forests provide timber, various forest products especially firewood, the pastures support the livestock and the uncultivated and barren lands are utilized for construction of houses, poultry farms and animal husbandry. Various studies have revealed that they account for up to 16 to 50 per cent of the income of landless and poor farmers respectively. Due to “open access” and rampant use, the CLR are declining all over India in general and the Indo-Gangetic Plain in particular. The present study was undertaken to analyze the dynamics of CLR in the sampled district of Uttar Pradesh in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The study reveals that there is a considerable decline in these resources during the last decades. The detailed analysis of CLR utilization and its social correlates testifies for its role in providing economic gains and livelihood to its users. Thus, the present study reveals the significance of common land resources in sustainable regional development.