56 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
landlord government are virtually the serfs of the Forest Department. The seizure of bullocks and agricultural implements at the time of cultivation , phala (propitiation money) at sowing, ira (share of the Forest Department in the crop) at harvest, pan-phut (lump sum cash bribe) from the whole village, the inevitable panchnama (brokerage of the tout), chirimiri (bribe for securing convenient date or for award of lighter sentence and other favours) to clerks of the court, payment of fine or imprisonment every year, veth-bigar (unpaid and forced labour), satiation of the Sahibs with meat and wine: these are the additional burdens of the unorganized, landless forest cultivators.
Vanguard of Agrarian Revolution
The organized landless forest cultivators of Sakri and Nawapur talukas have been tilling the wastelands for a number of years with the intention of becoming the rightful owners. They had just about overcome the age-old starvation and mitigated the agonies of poverty. Their purchasing power also had increased proportionately. But due to the rocketing rise in prices of the last few years, the landless agricultural labourers and poor peasants (48.5 per cent of the total landholders in Maharashtra) are able to purchase less and less of manufactured goods. These toilers engaged in agriculture constitute 64.1 per cent of the total working force. Their impoverishment has an impact on the entire economy of the state.
The way out of this agrarian crisis lies in abolition of private and state landlordism, distribution of all the wastelands belonging to the Forest and Revenue Departments to the landless, confiscation without compensation of all the lands of the parasitic landlord class and all the surplus lands of rich peasants and their distribution gratis to agricultural labourers and poor peasants. The struggles of the landless agricultural labourers and poor peasants, may they be against private or state landlordism or against wage slavery, are the struggles for the revolution in land relations that clears the way for radical social and economic transformation. The most backward landless Adivasis of Maharashtra form a vanguard regiment of the agrarian revolution.
' "The Character, Range and Intensity of the Famine in Sakri Taluka, 1972.73",a sample survey by the staff of the Arts and Commerce College, Sakri, Dhulia district.
3 V Dandekar and N Rath, in Poverty in India, assume Rs 15 as the minimum monthly per capita expenditure on subsistence level at 1960-61 prices. The Sakri survey puts the figure in 1972-73 at Rs 33 on a 221 per cent price rise since 1960-61.