Ayana N K
Background
Kerala’s Tribal Resettlement and Development Mission (TRDM) traces its origins to one of the most consequential Adivasi mobilisations in the state’s history. In October 2001, thousands of landless Scheduled Tribe (ST) families, organised under the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS) and led by C.K. Janu and M. Geethanandan, staged a 48 day kudil kettal samaram (hut building protest) outside the Kerala Secretariat. The agitation followed the deaths of over thirty Adivasis from starvation related causes in Wayanad and demanded the distribution of cultivable land to the estimated 52,000 landless tribal families identified by the state.
The then United Democratic Front (UDF) government, led by A.K. Antony, responded with a package promising one to five acres of cultivable land to every landless Adivasi family, along with financial assistance for land development. To operationalise this commitment, the state government constituted the Tribal Resettlement and Development Mission, envisaged as a “mission mode” institutional vehicle under the Scheduled Tribes Development Department (STDD) for purchasing and distributing land, and for supporting resettled families with housing, infrastructure, and livelihood assistance.
The scheme’s core provision was straightforward: landless ST families would receive a minimum of one acre of land, up to a ceiling of five acres, with those holding less than an acre eligible to have their holding topped up to the minimum threshold. Because Kerala had little surplus revenue land available, the state also sought forestland from the central government. That request went unfulfilled for over a year and became a proximate cause of the 2003 Muthanga occupation, in which Adivasi families entered the Muthanga Wildlife Sanctuary in Wayanad to press their land claims. The police crackdown that followed, resulting in the deaths of an Adivasi protester and a police constable, remains a defining moment in Kerala’s tribal rights history and continues to shape public memory of the unfulfilled TRDM promise, as reflected in recent cultural references such as the 2025 Malayalam film Narivetta.
The legal backdrop to TRDM is itself layered. The Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act of 1975 carried a retrospective mandate, invalidating land transfers from Adivasis dating back to 1960 and providing for restoration of alienated land. This was diluted and effectively repealed in 1999, replaced by the considerably weaker Kerala Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Act, 1999, which offered no comparable mechanism for restoring already alienated holdings, a dilution many Adivasis viewed as a betrayal of the 1975 Act’s original promise. The central Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006 compounds this gap: it recognises pre existing customary community and individual forest rights, for land occupied prior to December 13, 2005 and up to four hectares, rather than providing for the distribution of newly acquired non forest cultivable land. With neither the 1999 Act nor the FRA offering a route to fresh land distribution, TRDM has remained, in practice, the only standing state mechanism through which landless Adivasis can claim new land, a gap felt most acutely among Wayanad’s tribal communities, including the Paniya, Adiya, and Kattunaikkan groups, who formed the core of the 2001 starvation related protests and continue to face disproportionate land alienation relative to other Scheduled Tribe groups in the state.
Functioning
TRDM operates under the administrative control of the STDD, implemented through a network of Tribal Development Offices (TDOs) and Integrated Tribal Development Project (ITDP) offices spread across Kerala’s tribal concentration districts, including Wayanad, Idukki, and Kannur. Its core functions are land purchase (from willing sellers, given the scarcity of state revenue land), land survey and identification through a continuing “land bank survey,” land distribution to eligible landless families, and post settlement support covering housing, drinking water, and basic infrastructure at resettlement colonies. Under this Land Bank Scheme, land offered by private sellers is vetted through a multi stage administrative process, including title verification to confirm clear ownership, slope and contour inspection to assess cultivability, and valuation by revenue authorities to determine purchase price, before a parcel is cleared for acquisition. This procedural chain, spanning multiple offices, is itself a significant source of the delays that bottleneck land purchase under the scheme.
One of TRDM’s most significant undertakings was the resettlement scheme at Aralam Farm in Kannur district, a roughly 7,500 acre estate the state government purchased from the Centre in 2004 for around ₹42 crore, drawn from the Scheduled Tribes Rehabilitation Fund, the corpus fund constituted specifically pursuant to the 2001 agreement between the state government and the AGMS to finance land purchase and resettlement under TRDM. Of this, about 4,054 acres were earmarked for resettling landless tribal families with one acre each, while the remaining area was retained to run the Aralam Farming Corporation (Kerala) Limited (AFCL), incorporated in 2010 as a self sustaining cooperative style public enterprise intended to generate livelihood opportunities for the resettled community. In practice, however, AFCL’s top down bureaucratic management structure has left it divorced from community governance, with resettled families having little say in the corporation’s operations despite being its intended beneficiaries.
Funding for TRDM flows through the state plan budget, supplemented in some years by allocations meant for the implementation of the FRA. However, an examination of expenditure patterns raises questions about the institutional design itself: a substantial share of TRDM’s annual budget across several districts has gone toward salaries and establishment costs of TDO and ITDP staff, land bank survey expenses, and site manager remuneration, rather than toward actual land purchase or family level land transfer.
Performance
Assessed against its founding objective of extending one to five acres of land to each of Kerala’s landless Adivasi families, TRDM’s implementation record over the past two decades has been persistently weak, and recent data suggest performance has not improved.
Right to Information (RTI) responses obtained from the STDD for the period 2020 to 2025 show that in 2023-24, the state provisioned ₹45 crore for TRDM, of which only about ₹26 crore, or roughly 58 per cent, was actually spent. In 2024-25, of a ₹37 crore provision, just ₹11.4 crore, or about 31 per cent, was utilised, a marked decline in budget absorption even as the scale of allocation shrank. Underspending of this magnitude, sustained over consecutive years, points to structural bottlenecks in land identification and acquisition rather than a simple shortage of funds.
District-level data reinforces this picture. In Wayanad’s Sulthan Bathery TDO, the district where the Muthanga struggle originated, only about 15 acres of new land were distributed to 118 families between 2021 and 2025, averaging roughly 0.13 acre per family against the promised one-to-five-acre entitlement, while over ₹5.7 crore was spent in the process. Mananthavady TDO in the same district distributed just over 4 acres to 47 families in the same period, averaging about 0.09 acre per family. Meanwhile, the Kalpetta ITDP office spent over ₹63 lakh in 2024-25 alone on land bank surveys, even as new distribution across the district’s TDOs remained in single-digit acreage. In Idukki’s Chinnakkanal settlement under the Adimali TDO, no new land was allotted over the past five years, with budgetary allocations going almost entirely toward staff salaries. At Aralam, roughly ₹30 lakh and ₹24 lakh were spent on office expenses in 2023-24 and 2024-25 respectively, paid from TRDM funds rather than the state’s regular salary head, while a further ₹1.5 crore went toward wages at the Aralam Farming Corporation in 2023-24, with no clarity on how many resettled Adivasis were actually employed.
Impact
The scheme’s impact on the ground reveals a wide gap between the 2001 promise and lived outcomes. Academic research on Aralam, one of TRDM’s largest resettlement sites, found that of 3,375 households originally allotted land, 1,184 families, or roughly 35 per cent, subsequently abandoned their plots, citing inadequate livelihood support, poor connectivity, absence of basic amenities, and recurring wildlife conflict. Journalistic accounts place the abandonment figure at Aralam closer to half the resettled families. Elephant attacks have proved a persistent and lethal hazard at several TRDM colonies; despite over ₹5 lakh spent on “elephant walls” at Aralam in 2023-24, an elderly Adivasi couple were killed by a wild elephant near the settlement in early 2025.
Scholarly analysis characterises the pattern at Aralam as a shift from land justice to “welfare management,” where periodic transfers of rations, allowances, and other benefits are used to retain families on marginal, poorly serviced plots rather than resolving the underlying land question through comprehensive land reform. This dynamic, researchers argue, allows the state to defuse land agitations in the short term while reproducing landlessness over the long term. Compounding this, in 2024 the Aralam Farm management leased over 1,600 acres of land originally purchased for tribal rehabilitation to private agri-business entities for periods of up to 30 years, prompting protests from tribal organisations who argued this diverted rehabilitation land away from its intended beneficiaries.
District-level land distribution (2021–2025)
| Office | Land Distributed | Families | Avg. per Family | Notes |
| Sulthan Bathery TDO (Wayanad) | ~15 acres | 118 | ~0.13 acre | ₹5.7 crore spent; origin of the Muthanga struggle |
| Mananthavady TDO (Wayanad) | ~4 acres | 47 | ~0.09 acre | — |
| Kalpetta ITDP (Wayanad) | Single-digit acreage | — | — | ₹63 lakh spent on land bank surveys in 2024–25 alone |
| Chinnakkanal, Adimali TDO (Idukki) | 0 acres | 0 | — | No land allotted in 5 years; funds went almost entirely to staff salaries |
Emerging Issues
First, chronic underspending and low fund utilisation indicate that land acquisition, dependent on a “willing seller” model in a state with little surplus revenue land, is not functioning as an effective mechanism, twenty-plus years after the scheme’s inception.
Second, a disproportionate share of TRDM’s budget is consumed by administrative and survey costs rather than land transfer itself, suggesting institutional capture by process rather than outcomes.
Third, resettled families frequently receive land in isolated, ecologically fragile locations without complementary investment in connectivity, water, healthcare, or protection from wildlife, undermining the sustainability of settlement.
Fourth, there is limited transparency and monitoring: RTI data had to be specifically sought to establish basic facts such as families settled, acreage transferred, and expenditure patterns, indicating weak public reporting by the STDD.
Finally, the diversion or commercial leasing of rehabilitation land, as seen at Aralam, points to weak safeguards protecting land earmarked for tribal resettlement from subsequent repurposing.
Way Forward
Addressing these gaps requires several coordinated interventions. First, the STDD should conduct a comprehensive, time-bound audit of land identified, purchased, and distributed under TRDM since 2001, published in the public domain, to establish an accurate baseline against the original 52,000-family target. Second, budgetary allocations should be restructured to cap administrative and survey expenditure as a proportion of total TRDM outlay, redirecting resources toward actual land acquisition and family-level support.
Third, resettlement planning must integrate livelihood, infrastructure, and human-wildlife conflict mitigation from the outset, rather than treating these as afterthoughts once families have already been settled; this could draw on convergence with MGNREGS, PM-JANMAN, and state rural infrastructure schemes. Fourth, legal safeguards are needed to permanently ring-fence land purchased for tribal rehabilitation, of the kind seen at Aralam, from subsequent commercial leasing or diversion. Finally, given the scale of unmet demand, the state should explore a revived, time-bound land reform approach, potentially including reconsideration of surplus and ceiling-surrendered land, rather than relying indefinitely on the constrained willing-seller model that has structurally limited TRDM’s reach for over two decades.
References
- Kerala Scheduled Tribes Development Department. (n.d.). Resettlement of Landless Tribal People (TRDM). https://www.stdd.kerala.gov.in/index.php/resettlement-of-landless
- Sudheesh, R. C. (2025, June 10). Narivetta’s partial image of Muthanga struggle: Adivasi fight for land drags on for 22 years. The News Minute. https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/narivettas-partial-image-of-muthanga-struggle-adivasi-fight-for-land-drags-on-for-22-years
- Sudheesh, M. S. (2023). State life: Land, welfare and management of the landless in Kerala, India. Development and Change, 54. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12789
- Sreerekha, M. S. (2010). Challenges before Kerala’s landless: The story of Aralam Farm. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(21), 55–62.
- Land Conflict Watch. (2024–2025). Tribal rehabilitation versus commercial leasing: The Aralam Farm land dispute in Kerala’s Kannur. https://www.landconflictwatch.org/conflicts/tribal-rehabilitation-versus-commercial-leasing-the-aralam-farm-land-dispute-in-kerala-s-kannur
- Down to Earth. (2003). Kerala tribals stand and protest for land. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/kerala-tribals-stand-and-protest-for-land-46275
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). Adivasi Gotra Maha Sabha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adivasi_Gotra_Maha_Sabha
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). C. K. Janu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Janu
- Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India. Tribal Digital Document Repository. Tribal Resettlement and Development Mission: A Study of Resettled Tribes at Aralam, Kerala and TRIBAL METAFORM: Evaluation Study on TRDM — Problems and Challenges. https://repository.tribal.gov.in
About the Contributor
Ayana N K is a Political Science graduate from the University of Calicut. With a keen interest in public policy, international relations, and development studies.
Acknowledgement
The author extends her sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for their expert guidance and constructive feedback throughout the process.
Reviewed by Anushree Khare and Shruti Chandra.
Disclaimer
All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization.
