Shramik Mukti Dal


Shramik Mukti Dal, is a socio-political organization in Maharashtra, India. It is an organization working in eleven districts of Maharashtra, organizing farmers and toilers on issues of drought, dam and project eviction, and caste oppression. The Shramik Mukti Dal follows an ideology not simply based on Marxism but on Marx-Phule-Ambedkarism.
SMD has been instrumental in waging a movement for water rights for more that two decades. Much of development was uncontrolled, rapacious excavation of sand from riverbeds for the construction industry in drought-prone areas of Western Maharashtra, which had led to the drying up of the wells in the nearby farms. SMD along with local communities, socially committed ecological engineers, science-activists and other activists, progressive intellectuals, and media people led a prolonged, successful struggle to stop this unlimited excavation of this sand and built the Baliraja dam. This idea came out of detailed discussions with the people of the villages -Balawadi and Tandulwadi on the two sides of the river Yerala. The idea was that people in the villages will receive preferential right to excavate a limited amount of sand in the river in their village, sell it after paying due royalty to the government. This money financed finance the Baliraja dam, which helped eliminate the effects drought in these two villages.
Some of the leading members include Bharat Patankar, Sampat Desai, Indutai Patankar, Gail Omvedt, Mukti Sadhna, Rahul Savita , Shailesh Sawant.

History

Shramik Mukti Dal was founded in the 1980s by activists in Maharashtra, influenced not only by the radical Marxist movement but also by feminists and anti-caste movements. The Shramik Mukti Dal fights for alternatives in today’s inequalitarian, caste, class and gender-ridden ecologically unsustainable society. The following have been some of its accomplishments:

Shramik Mukti Dal leads a movement of equitable water distribution from 1983 onwards. It was successful in forcing the government to change the plans of the command areas from inequitable basis to equitable water distribution patterns, thereby providing minimum water of sustainability by doing agriculture, etc. In 2005, the Government of Maharashtra approved Tasgaon-Atpadi Equitable Water Distribution Alternative, awarding water rights, even to the landless. SMD is a major leading constituent of the Pro-People Water Strategy Form.
Caste annihilation movement: by organizing caste annihilation conferences, SMD has started a struggle on the basis of a practical program going towards caste annihilation. I has been taking lead in fighting against atrocities on dalits and other oppressed castes

Manifesto

An excerpt from the SMD manifesto:
A revolution that creates a new ecologically balanced, prosperous, non-exploitative society is not an “event” that takes place in one day. It is necessary to start this process of revolutionary transformation from today itself. Briefly, revolution is not a single “event” but a “process” that makes change. It is a process of striking one blow after another against the roots of the established capitalist, casteist, patriarchal, social-economic structure, and establishing again and again the roots creating the new society. It is a process of new creation.”