Land Ownership in Meghalaya: Custom as the Law

Start with the two great categories the Khasi hills made famous. Ri-Raid is the community's land, held by the village or the raid for its people, allocated for use rather than owned outright, and reverting when use lapses. Ri-Kynti is land in private or clan hands, heritable and dealable within custom's bounds. Which category a plot belongs to changes everything a buyer may hope to do with it, and the categories have cousins, differently named, in the Jaintia and Garo traditions.

Authority is layered and personal. The autonomous district councils, one each for the Khasi, Jaintia and Garo hills, carry the Sixth Schedule's law-making power over land. Below them stand the traditional institutions, the Syiem's durbar in Khasi country, the Dolloi in the Jaintia hills, the Nokma over a Garo a'king, whose administration of allocation and disputes is not ceremonial but operative.

Two more features complete the picture. Inheritance in the matrilineal communities commonly runs through daughters, with the youngest daughter's special position in Khasi custom shaping who holds ancestral property. And the state's transfer regulation stands guard over all of it, restricting how tribal land may move to non-tribal persons, which for outside buyers is the beginning and end of many conversations.

Category first; everything else follows it.

Reading a plot's category

The categories and the people behind them.

Ownership questions here go wrong four ways.

The transfer regulation makes Meghalaya's position plain: tribal land is protected from passing to non-tribal hands, and lawful outside involvement runs through leases, permissions and structures the councils and the state actually sanction.