Land in India: A tectonic shift

In view of the rising food security concerns, a 2009 UN report noted that the acquisition of land internationally is one possible strategic choice to address the challenge. As spectre of uncertainty looms over a future without affordable food and water, billions of people around the world riven already by repression and recession, corruption and mismanagement, boundary disputes and ancient feuds, ethnic tension and religious fundamentalism are beginning to face the heat. A 21st century land rush is very much on.

How to feed the world that is going to host nine billion people by 2050 – a modest estimate only if the developing world applies brakes on population growth – is the burning question. Even if about one billion people who remain chronically malnourished or starving continue to stay in a state of food deprivation, 900 million additional hectares of land would be required to produce food, which, in plain terms, means either displacement or deforestation. Land being extremely scarce, it is estimated that only 100 million hectares can be added to the 4.3 billion hectares already under cultivation worldwide.

Develop or perish

In India, where agricultural societies are in the throes of becoming industrial societies the country is whetting a large appetite for industrialisation buoyed by a push for economic surges. Develop or perish becoming the mantra, India’s dilemma is how to divert its fertile farmland—where more than half of the 1.2 billion population live off farming—into lands for industrial use. Dictated by the need for economic expediency—which detractors say neo-liberal—between 1990 and 2003, 2.1 million hectares of agricultural land—land that could have fed millions of India’s hungry—have been used for non-agricultural use.

In economic terms, the farm sector accounts for only 17 per cent of India’s GDP, while the industrial sector contributes 29 per cent. But agricultural land in particular needs to be sustained to support the large proportion (now 52 per cent) of the total population of India that continues to be in agriculture. According to the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), some 2 billion people in the developing world depend on 500 million small farms for their livelihoods. In Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, these small farmers produce about 80 per cent of the food that local people consume. Norman Borlaug – father of Green Revolution – prognosticated way back in 1970 that there can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.

There can be little dispute over the fact that industrial advancement and progress are necessary and inevitable. But in India, the commodification of land is fuelling the corporate land grab, both through the creation of Special Economic Zones and through foreign direct investment in real estate. The scale of this land grab is so gargantuan in some pockets of India that people are at war with the government. Besides, as historian Ramachandra Guha has pointed out, the tribals have gained the least and lost the most from India being a free and democratic country. Live as they do in India’s densest forests, along its fastest-flowing rivers, and atop its richest veins of iron ore and bauxite, it is the tribals who had to pay the price for India’s ‘development.’

The government carried out ruthless industrial expansion at the cost of fertile land for ‘public purpose’ – a loosely defined and much-riled term in the country’s archaic Land Acquisition Act. In the first forty years of the country’s planned development period (1951-1990), a study shows, 2 per cent of the total population had been displaced by mammoth projects such as Sardar Sarovar Project in Gujarat with little thought being spared for the compensation and resettlement of the martyrs to the cause of India’s ‘development’. Could one be faulted if one comes to compare this with the instance of North America’s decimation of hundreds of thousands of natives in the mid-19th century? Or, with Stalin in Russia who with his mass collectivisation of Soviet agriculture embarked on the most infamous state-sponsored land-grab in modern history?

India seems to buck the global trend of sustaining agriculture in the pretext of industrial development. On way to reform its land policy, the government of the day must conjure up a solid policy to transfer its huge agrarian population to urbanised occupations in the industrial or the service economy. With its huge population load, a bulk of which go hungry, and extreme pressure on available land, torn by economic needs for infrastructure, housing and industrialisation besides agriculture, India must count the social cost of this massive tectonic shift.