'Land Acquisition Bill benefits realtors'

He was delivering the Brother Jose Vetticattil Memorial Lecture on ‘Rural India After Two Decades of Liberalisation’ organised by Functional Vocational Training and Research Society on Friday.

“The focus of the Land Acquisition Bill is about making it easier to acquire single crop land as opposed to multicrop land. But the poorest of the poor who own land hardly have any multicrop land. Dalits and Adivasis will be the first ones to lose their land and this Bill will only make it easier,” he said.

Sainath also said that big companies like Tatas obtained land at throwaway prices and kept it unused for years without starting any project, and later sold it to other companies at exorbitant rates.

Citing the example of Posco in Orissa, he said the company had itself declared that the iron ore mined would be exhausted in 30 years, by which time, the topsoil would have been removed without leaving any chance for cultivation.

“We are allowing private corporations to plunder our natural resources,” he said.