The local people of the Tawa reservoir area organised to demand which right…

After Independence, large dam and reservoir projects across India submerged agricultural land and displaced local communities. Where the resulting water body created a new resource, such as the fish stocks that build up in a reservoir, the state typically retained or leased out control of that resource, and the displaced communities who depended on it for their livelihood organised specifically to claim access to that particular resource rather than to any general land-based right.

The Tawa Dam in Madhya Pradesh submerged villages and farmland when it was built, displacing local families from their land. In the 1990s the state government leased out the fishing contract for the Tawa reservoir to outside contractors, cutting the displaced villagers off from the fish stocks in the very water body that had submerged their land. The affected villagers organised into a fishworkers' cooperative, the Tawa Matsya Sangh, to press their demand that the fishing rights over the reservoir be granted to them instead of outside contractors, since fishing in the reservoir had become their main available livelihood after displacement.

• Cultivation rights concern growing crops on agricultural land. The demand raised by the displaced villagers was about access to the reservoir's fish stocks, not about land under the plough.

• Horticulture rights concern growing fruits, vegetables, or ornamental plants on land. They do not cover access to a reservoir's aquatic resources.

• Commercial Forestry rights concern harvesting timber or forest produce for sale. They are unrelated to fishing in a reservoir.

The right the displaced villagers of the Tawa reservoir area organised to demand in the 1990s was fishing rights over the reservoir.