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NC Saxena, former member of the Planning Commission and National Advisory Council, speaks to Kanika Datta
-Business Standard

NC Saxena, former member of the Planning Commission and National Advisory Council has been critical of the land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement Act. He tells Kanika Datta why things are unlikely to improve with the amendments recently passed by the Lok Sabha. Edited excerpts:

* You were critical of the LARR Act but less so of the ordinance. Why?

Let me clarify. The 2013 Act was anti-farmer and anti-industry. The ordinance is pro-industry but continues to be anti-farmer. The ordinance introduced three main changes. One, doing away with the social impact assessment for many projects. Two, removing the consent clause. Three, making rehabilitation and resettlement applicable to the 13 Acts under which the government acquires land - like the Coal Bearing Act, and for the railways and highways.

The first has shortened the acquisition process. Land acquisition involves direct and indirect costs. Compared to the 1894 Act, direct costs rose a little but indirect costs increased manifold, because procedures became difficult. For instance, in the 1894 Act, the powers lie with the district magistrate. In the 2013 Act, the powers are with the chief secretary. Second, even to acquire one acre of land, you needed a social impact assessment (SIA). This report will then be examined by an expert committee, a chief secretary's committee, a monitoring committee. Therefore, industry, which is in a hurry, will have to bribe at every step for the file to go through. But the ordinance should have also changed all the clauses that cause delays in land acquisition, including the power given to the chief secretary.

* In the amendments the SIA has been done away with for government and public purpose projects. Do you think SIA should be scrapped for private sector projects in general?

Today, land is being acquired mostly for the private sector because the government is not going to set up new undertakings. In any case, for the government's requirements there are 13 other Acts that have not been touched. So the SIA could be done away for private sector projects up to a certain limit - say, 100 hectares. Land acquisition should be called land augmentation because it reduces the pressure on land. For instance, one hectare, which is 10,000 square metres, of farm land generally employs one family. A paanwala needs about 10 square meters, so 1,000 paan shops can be established on one hectare. That is why even when private sector acquires land, it serves a public purpose.

* So you think the social impact assessments should be done away with even for private sector projects?

In any case, these assessments are not needed for the public sector. If you look at land acquisition from 1950 to 1980, most displacement took place in the big dams and new townships were being constructed such as Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar, Gandhinagar, and so on. Now these big dams are no longer being constructed and, today, land is acquired mostly for the private sector because the government is not going to set up new undertakings. And for government's requirements the 13 other Acts have not been touched. So the social impact assessments should be done away for private sector projects up to a certain limit - say, 100 hectares.

* You have said it is wrong to give up the consent clause. Isn't 80 per cent too high?

If the land cost as a percentage of project cost is low, as we know it is, why can't you make the farmer happy? You could lower it to, say, 60 per cent of farmers, most of them small and marginal, but why would they say yes when 40 per cent are unhappy?

* Should there be a ceiling on compensation?

You can't have consent and a ceiling on compensation. Compensation should be negotiated, otherwise on what basis will a farmer give his consent? Consent can go only when there is no upper ceiling. This could have been avoided if the compensation had been made three to six times market value from two to four times but the acquisition time had been reduced to three months from five years.

* Some say the ceiling is high ...

How much money goes to the farmer? Take Posco. The original cost was Rs 54,000 crore and it might have gone up to Rs 80,000 crore and about 600 people were being displaced. If they gave one per cent as compensation, each family should get about Rs 1 crore. The highest amount the Odisha government offered was Rs 12 lakh. This is not a zero-sum game in which you either benefit industry or the farmer. It is easy to benefit both by reducing time and increasing compensation. Instead, they have increased time so that politicians and land mafia will benefit and the farmer will lose.

* The amendments of March 9 have amended the rehabilitation and resettlement award to include employment of an affected family of a farm labourer.

That is a very good clause. But just as we have about nine entitlement Acts - right to food, right to employment and so on - that have remained on paper, this one too will remain on paper! And the amendment doesn't say who will give employment. So the contractor can employ someone to work at Rs 500 a month. But if it works it is a good thing because in many projects there's a lot of secondary employment. If you take a 4,000 Mw power plant, it will displace about 300 people but it will generate so much electricity that in almost 10 districts imagine how many more farmers will get power,- so employment will be generated on those farms and in the small and medium industries that will come up.

* But farmers worry about what kind of jobs they'll get since most jobs in industrial projects are skilled jobs.

That is why the government has to plan in advance for large projects. When I visited Niyamgiri in 2001, the government knew about the Vedanta project then. But in 2011 when I visited, I found that the government had made no attempt to improve the skills of the people even though it had a lot of time to do so. The Posco project was known 10 years back, but even now the government has made no attempt to improve the skills of the people. So local people feel very hesitant because they only know how to farm. If you had improved their skills, why would they not support the project? Some of the tribals who had been employed by Vedanta have a good life - I could see TVs in their houses, and mobiles. But 3 km away from Lanjigarh, those tribals could not even speak Oriya and 95 per cent of them were illiterate. So jobs are being created there -- but mainly for outsiders.

Business Standard, 13 March, 2015, http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/po
liticians-land-mafia-will-benefit-from-larr-bill-farmers-w
ill-lose-n-c-saxena-115031200963_1.html

Image Courtesy: Business Standard