Colonial land reforms erased Maharashtra’s traditional grazing routes, finds IIT Bombay researcher

Long before GPS coordinates and bureaucratic land records mapped every inch of India, shepherds in Maharashtra traversed districts along shared grazing corridors sanctioned by the State. This mobility was not just cultural – it was institutional.

Rushikesh Gawade, a PhD researcher at IIT Bombay, has traced the historical roots of Maharashtra’s disappearing sheep pastures and the ongoing demand for State-wide grazing corridors by nomadic shepherds. His study reveals how British-era land reforms systematically dismantled expansive, community-managed grazing networks, raising urgent questions about land rights, pastoral livelihoods, and the governance of commons in contemporary Maharashtra.

Mr. Gawade presented his findings at the 20th biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from June 16 to 20, 2025. The conference, themed ‘Regenerating the Commons’, provided a platform to share insights from months of archival research into the pre-colonial Makta system – a land revenue model that formally taxed and regulated access to shared pasturelands.

Under this system, known as Mendrachi Vancharai, nomadic shepherds paid fees to graze their flocks across vast tracts of uncultivated land, including forests. These pastures were not demarcated by administrative borders, but by natural boundaries – often two riverbanks forming a corridor. The system is documented in 18th-century Peshwa diaries and later referenced in British colonial records.

One such record, an 1823 report by Mountstuart Elphinstone, then Governor of the Bombay Presidency, described the sheep pastures as “inconvenient” for administration, citing a lack of authority over itinerant shepherds. His solution: dismantle the system.

The British replaced these flexible arrangements with rigid, boundary-based land records. The Survey and Settlement Act of 1865 legally recognised village grazing lands but confined them within fixed village limits,  a move that effectively criminalised the inter-district movement of shepherds.

“What’s striking is how a system that once enabled mobility was gradually replaced by one that rendered it illegitimate. Pastureland governance shifted from negotiated access to centralised bureaucratic control,” said Mr. Gawade.