 Hi, I'm Namita Vahi. I'm a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and I head the Land Rights Initiative there, which I created a few years ago essentially to create an institutional space for doing systematic research on land issues in India, especially mapping the state's relationship to land and how the state redistributes land relations between various individuals and groups in the country. So at the Land Rights Initiative currently we have several projects where we are trying to map this relationship. The first project which is on land acquisition which is about the state's power to expropriate land belonging to private individuals for a public purpose upon payment or just compensation. This project is essentially trying to intervene meaningfully in the policy and legislative debates regarding land acquisition because there was a historic replacement of an existing law in land acquisition which had been in force for 120 years but soon after it came into force there was an attempt to amend the law further which means that the contestation around land acquisition continues and we haven't really settled it legislatively at all. So what we tried to do was to create systematic data. We created database of all Supreme Court decisions on land acquisition over the last 66 years. So this is the most comprehensive and systematic study of land acquisition litigation in India but it is also one of the most representative studies because the Supreme Court hears cases from all across the country so geographically as well we've covered litigation from all the states in India that has gone up to the Supreme Court. We also have a few other projects on land. We have one project where we are studying land rights in the scheduled areas of India. These are specially demarcated areas under the fifth and sixth schedules of the Indian Constitution which creates special protections for tribal populations or indigenous populations in India. So essentially these schedules pertain to tribal majority districts in tribal minority states within Peninsula India so 10 states within Peninsula India and the sixth schedule applies to tribal populations in the northeastern states of India some of whom are tribal majority states like Vighalaya. So essentially in this project what we are investigating is why are these tribal populations the most vulnerable and displaced groups within India and also the most impoverished even though we have specialized protections and there we find that you know the specialized protections are nullified by a contrary regime of land acquisition, forest and mining laws in which is why this also relates to the work on land acquisition as well. Apart from this we are also trying to create a systematic database of all land laws in India. We are going to put this up on a website so that it is easily accessible to the public. In fact we have found already 804 laws governing various aspects of land including land tenancy, land ceiling, land acquisition and so on and we are planning to put this out on a public platform very soon and finally we are also working on a project on the constitutional right to property which enables individuals to claim their property as their right against the state when it wants to take it away so it regulates when the state can take away your rights and this right was particularly important in the entire demonetization exercise that recently took place which essentially involved taking away of people's money and sort of eliminating the RBI's debt on these issues. So these are the four projects that we are working on and here at this conference we are very pleased to be here at this first international conference on land and development and I will be speaking tomorrow about our research on the land acquisition cases. Thank you.