Initiative: Land Conflict Watch
Organization: Land Conflict Watch
Country: India
Facebook: @LCWIndia
Twitter: @LandConflicts
Website: www.landconflictwatch.org
In the last couple of decades, India’s aim for industrial and infrastructure growth has led to its acquisition of more and more land, often by ignoring and sometimes bulldozing land rights of vulnerable communities. Some of these conflicts turn violent and violate human rights. However, there is no national database of land conflicts, and many of these conflicts go unreported in national media. To bridge this gap, journalists Ankur Paliwal and Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava started Land Conflict Watch in 2016.
Land Conflict Watch is an independent, research-based data-journalism project that maps and documents land conflicts involving communities across India to initiate political debate and policy discourse on land rights. Land Conflict Watch is a website that uses extensive amounts of public data to document cases of conflicting claims over land use and ownership. So far, it has documented over 550 ongoing conflicts across 2 million hectares of land, which affect more than six million people and investments worth 14.3 trillion rupees. These cases are also profiled on social media as and when they are reported, thus bringing attention to the scale of such conflicts and engaging people in a dialogue on the same.
