Commons cover nearly
25% of India's land and form the
lifeline for over 350 million people, including marginalised groups like Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women. As governance structures, legal frameworks, and political priorities have changed, these landscapes are being invisibilised. Fragmented across categories such as public land, government land, private property and the contested label of “wasteland,” commons are becoming spaces of resource contestations. Despite their vitality in millions of lives, commons have no singular legal identity and are frequently classified as vacant or underutilised land. This fails to adequately recognise the labour, dependence, and stewardship of communities.As infrastructure projects, industrial expansion, conservation regimes, and climate change increasingly reshape these spaces, the stakes for the communities that depend on them continue to grow. In the
Land Conflict Watch database, mapping nearly 1,095 land conflicts, nearly 78% involve commons as sites of contestation.
Through the 100 Stories of Commons project, we attempt to visualise the idea of commons and their relationships with people. By stepping into local landscapes, we are documenting how communities, with or without formal legal recognition, protect, restore, reclaim, and benefit from their commons. These stories make visible the social, ecological, and political significance of commons, while preserving lessons on collective stewardship often overlooked in mainstream narratives of land and development.