The Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee was formed in 2014 in Sangrur district to enforce the law reserving one third of village common land for cultivation by Scheduled Caste households.
The law has existed since 1961. In practice the reserved third was captured at auction through proxy bidders acting for dominant-caste farmers, with a Dalit name on the paperwork.
The committee's method is to organise Dalit households in a village to bid collectively at the auction and to hold the land, which requires standing against the village's landholding families and the police.
It has secured land in a substantial number of villages, has faced criminal cases, and its members have been assaulted and in some cases killed.
It is the most significant land movement in Punjab since the muzara agitation of the 1940s, it involves the poorest third of the state's population, and it operates in the same districts.
It is almost entirely absent from national coverage of Punjab's agrarian politics, which is about farmers rather than labourers.
The shamlat, the village common, is what is being fought over. It belongs to the panchayat, it is leased at an annual auction, and the rent from it is the panchayat's own money. Reserving a third of it was a way of giving landless households a share of the one asset a village owns together.
Farming it collectively is the second half of the method. A group takes the lease, works the land together and splits what comes off it, so no single household carries the risk and no single household can be pressured out of the tenancy on its own. That structure is what has made the wins hold.
It has won land in a number of villages in Sangrur, Mansa and Patiala districts, and the confrontations have been serious. It is the most significant new rural movement in Punjab in decades.