Mumbai, Oct. 27 -- The Maharashtra government's proposal last month to repeal the Maharashtra Gramdan Act, 1964, has triggered a debate over the future of 21 villages in the state governed by a collective land-management system inspired by Gandhian thinker Acharya Vinoba Bhave. The Bhoodan movement, rooted in the idea of trusteeship and sarvodaya (welfare of all), was an effort to appeal to the conscience of wealthy landlords to voluntarily give away one-sixth of their lands for landless peasants. This evolved in the late 1950s into the Gramdan movement under which villages were run on the trusteeship model rather than as agglomeration of individual landholdings. Currently, there are 21 villages in the state-16 in Vidarbha, 1 in Kolhapur and 4 in Konkan-running on this model. The last village to adopt it in 2013 was in Gadchiroli. A cooperative mandal governs these villages. But now, the state government, citing changing socio-economic conditions, administrative issues and the need to remove outdated laws, has proposed scrapping the Act. Under the draft proposal, cooperative gramdan mandals would be scrapped and villages folded in the panchayati raj framework, land ownership would be restored to original owners or legal heirs based on revenue records, while land allotted to landless people and community groups would be regularised. "In cases where Gramdan land has been transferred to third parties through registered transactions, district collectors will conduct inquiries. Permissible transfers will be regularised, while other transfers may be regularised under Occupant Class-II tenure upon payment of the prescribed state premium (Nazrana)," said the notification. The Maharashtra Pradesh Sarvodaya Mandal has opposed the repeal. Their president Ramesh Dane conceded that farmers in the 21 gramdan villages often struggle to obtain bank loans because the land is vested in the Gram Mandal rather than held entirely in their names. They also face problems accessing compensation for crop losses and other government benefits. However, he said that instead of repealing the original Act, the government should amend it to retain its relevance. "Banks should be allowed to lend to Gram Mandals, which could assume collective responsibility for repayment." Vijay Diwan, a disciple of Vinoba Bhave who looks after the Vinoba Bhave Janmasthan Pratisthan at Raigad's Gagode threatened satyagraha should the Act was repealed "Various laws are being enacted to acquire land from farmers and give it to industrialists," he said. Devaji Tofa, former sarpanch of Mendha (Lekha) village in Gadchiroli said, "To say that the collectivist model is outdated and depriving farmers of government schemes is a false narrative."...