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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Get the government out of land deals by Abheek Barman

Get the government out of land deals by Abheek Barman

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published Published on Sep 22, 2010   modified Modified on Sep 22, 2010

Two days after the government scrapped a bauxite mining project in Orissa, Rahul Gandhi visited Niyamgiri, the ground zero of the anti-mine protests and told tribals that he was their sipahi in Delhi.

Around the same time, farmers in Uttar Pradesh said they wouldn’t sell their land at the rates the government was offering. India is growing fast, but hassles over the acquisition of land are going to be the greatest brakes on growth and social peace in the immediate future.

There are several reasons why this is likely. The law governing land purchases in India is 116 years old. It was amended once, three years ago, but those changes were never legislated in, and have now lapsed. Here’s one big problem with the law: it gives the government the right to buy land anywhere for a compensation to the original owners — provided the land is acquired for a public purpose. The sarkar, whether at the state or at the central level, is, therefore, the ultimate zamindar.

As India rolls out infrastructure projects at a breakneck pace, it’s hard to determine what is a project for the public good, and what is designed to maximise profits. Many infrastructure projects are partnerships between the government and private players, where the role of the government begins and ends after it acquires land for the developer and then sits back to collect rent.

For example, when the Uttar Pradesh government bought land to build the Noida to Greater Noida expressway around 10 years ago, it paid farmers between . 50 to . 300 for one sq m. Today, the Jaypee Group, a property developer, is selling plots there at . 15,000 per sq m.

Prices have climbed at least 50 times in a decade. And remember, one arm of the Jaypee Group is also the main contractor to build the expressway that’ll connect Noida with Agra.

Is the Noida-Agra Yamuna expressway aproject for the public good? You could argue that it is because after all there’s a road that’s being built to connect the two places . But what about the high rises, golf courses, for-profit schools and even a Formula-1 racetrack that’s supposed to come up along the expressway? Why should the government buy huge chunks of land cheap, and hand it over to private builders ?

Similar questions were asked when the government in West Bengal tried to acquire land for private projects. The trouble began in Singur almost three years ago, where Tata Motors wanted to locate its factory to build the Nano.

As protests dragged on, the government went ahead with another attempt to acquire land in Nandigram, for a dodgy Indonesian company to set up a chemicals complex. This ended in violence, and rising anger against the ruling CPI(M) in a state where it had been in power continuously for over 30 years.

Should the government buy any land if the end-user is private business? The amended — and now lapsed — version of the land law says it can buy up to 30% of the total project land for private businesses .

Many people, including rail mantri Mamta Banerjee, say that this should be zero, the government should never buy land for private businesses.

The new law tried to smoothen over the differences by saying that when the land is sold at a profit, 80% of the increase in prices should be handed over to the original owners. Ask yourself if, even with the best intentions, that’s possible in a country where most land is held by poor people without papers or proper legal deeds.

A massive rumpus has already started over where to build a second airport in Mumbai. The shortlisted zone near Navi Mumbai is ecologically fragile, and environment mantri Jairam Ramesh , who shot down the Vedanta mining project in Orissa, has shot down the Navi Mumbai airport as well.

In a recent paper in the Economic and Political Weekly, environment experts Debi Goenka and Gautam S Patel go through the pros and cons of the airport debate and conclude that it’ll make much more sense to expand the existing airport than build a new one.

It’s hard to disagree with their argument, especially when they point out that the only serious opposition to this comes from two MLAs, who depend on support from the slums surrounding the Chhatrapati Shivaji airport.

Naveen Patnaik, chief minister and leader of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) of Orissa , must be a worried man. New Delhi has not only scuttled the Niyamgiri mining project, it has also started asking uncomfortable questions about the embattled project of Korean steelmaker Posco in the state.


The Economic Times, 20 September, 2010, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/comments--analysis/Get-the-government-out-of-land-deals/articleshow/6596604.cms


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