UMERKOT: Peasants shared with audience stories of violent and inhuman behaviour of landlords to farm workers and their families at the 12th peasant conference and Rabi festival held by the Green Rural Development Organisation, an NGO, on Friday.

The festival was an effort to bring together peasants, landlords, labourers and general public in order to understand the peasant’s situation and try to improve it, said the programme host Dr Haider Malokhani.

He said that his organisation was anti-grower but it wanted to develop a working relationship between growers and peasants and unveil faces of the growers who had deprived peasants of their rights and made their lives miserable.

If the peasant was a shareholder in crop then why he was made to suffer extreme poverty, he asked.

Rahib Jalbani of PILER said that law and rights for the peasants existed on paper but not implemented in their spirit, therefore, they faced inhuman attitude.

He suggested peasants’ courts in the province to serve justice to peasants and implement the Sindh Tenancy Act.

A peasant woman Nabiyat said that her landlord had implicated four members of family in false cases after they demanded share in the crops. The landlord also deprived her family of their livestock, she said.

Peasant Ramji Oad said that the peasants approached courts only when their accounts were manipulated and they were treated like animals, tortured and humiliated by landlords.

Otherwise, who would want to leave their homes and lands, he asked.

Social activist Naseem Thebo said that at this time in each third village poor peasant girls were kept as keeps with the landlords, their resistance could result in death as Kakoo Kolhi was killed near Shadi Palli.

They deplored the death of nine-year-old Narain Bheel near Kunri who was killed by a landlord when police went to his farm to recover bonded labourers on court orders.