A flawed exercise

A recommendation made by the parliamentary standing committee on rural development last week to take the government out of the contentious issue of land acquisition for public purpose is shocking.

This single prescription has the effect of making the government’s Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement Bill, 2011, which the panel scrutinised before making this and other recommendations, a flawed exercise.

There is a case for a new legislation on land acquisition for public purpose in view of the myriad problems confronted in recent years in acquiring agricultural/forest land for urban, industrial and infrastructural expansion. There are issues of tribals, of protecting the shrinking forest space for tigers and elephants, of building roads, mining, and setting up power plants and large industrial units, all of which involve land acquisition.

Leaving land acquisition for public purpose to private parties is dangerously counter-productive. True, the panel has suggested manifold increase in the compensation amount to be paid to the land losers – both in urban and rural areas. The problems currently associated with land acquisition for public purpose is not merely a matter of offering better compensation. It is also about judicious acquisition and it is about the credibility of the ‘public purpose’ for which the land in question is acquired.

In booming urban centres across the country, private players would be in a position to lure agricultural land owners and offer huge attractive sums of money to give up their land. In fact, despite elaborate regulations and well-established civic bodies that are entrusted with the responsibility of land acquisition for planned urban growth, private players manage to acquire land and develop them commercially in ways that is patently contrary to city development plans. As a result, urban India is in a mess today – there are no roads, no civic infrastructure like parks and other public utilities. Similarly, in rural areas too freedom to private players to acquire land will be an invitation to disaster.

The need, on the contrary, is to have a central legislation that will make it mandatory for government agencies in-charge of planned urban development, such as Bangalore Development Authority or the Delhi Development Authority, to exercise their authority as the sole land acquiring body, and industrial development bodies as the sole bodies to decide on land acquisition. Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has assured to revisit the Bill. But it is not clear if he realises the dangers involved in the government abdicating its central role in matters of land acquisition.