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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Sarkar Is Still Mai-Baap by Pragya Singh

The revised blueprint for land acquisition envisages government retaining its facilitator role

Contentious Issues

    * Protests are often against land acquisition per se, regardless of compensation
    * Most protests are against private builders acquiring land, changing land use. New norms don’t tackle this.
    * Poor government track record in R&R does not inspire much confidence; merged bills won’t work for rehabilitation after natural calamities, etc
    * Can the government, which regulates land use, be regulated in turn by a super-regulator?
    * New norms step towards controlling exploitation but won’t speculation, the real menace.

***

In a move that took many by surprise, the National Advisory Council (NAC) huddled into a seven-hour discussion on the land acquisition and rehabilitation and resettlement bills on Wednesday, and emerged with a sweeping document that reaffirms the government’s will to keep a strong hold over all matters linked to land in the country. Against speculation that the NAC would want politicians to keep off the business of land acquisition entirely, it has proposed that no land should be acquired directly by private companies, unless they displace fewer than 400 households.

Though the backdrop couldn’t have been more contradictory—Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal is promising to return some land to farmers, while UP farmers are refusing higher compensation for acquired land which they want back—Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who heads NAC and sat through its meeting on Wednesday, clearly wants the two contentious bills back in Parliament, reimagined, by July.

Many proposals from the NAC are ambitious. For example, they want landless labour included among those who receive rehabilitation benefits. This was a proposal when the 2007 bills were being drafted too, but did not pass muster at the time. This time around, the NAC has insisted on not invoking an “urgency” clause to evict landowners, unless the acquisition is for national defence or security reasons. It has specifically mentioned jobs for a member of each displaced family in the industry being set up, wants joint accounts to be set up for compensation money, and in another big step, it wants land to revert to the original owners if the project it was acquired for doesn’t get set up within five years.

Says NAC member N.C. Saxena, whose views were pivotal to the current proposals, “So far, we have had too much of looking at industry’s interests at the cost of farmers and everybody else. We’ve tried to frame what is a win-win proposal for all sides.” The next step is going to Parliament with a draft of the bills—a job entrusted with the Union rural development ministry—but the process is fraught with uncertainty. Many view the government’s presence in land acquisition as reassuring to farmers. But just as many, and some members of the NAC as well, see the government’s role in land acquisition as a necessity for industry, but not necessarily benevolent.

Industry itself contends that it cannot go it alone and requires government assistance to bring around “hold-outs”—people who have the power to block industrial plans by refusing to sell land when a majority have agreed. The root of unrest over land acquisition isn’t just social, but political as well, argues Anirban Roy, who runs the Society for Educational Welfare and Economic Development, which works in rural India to create “harmony between corporation and community” through csr projects. “Corporates realise land is a sensitive topic,” he says. “That’s why they introduce their presence in new areas through setting up schools, hospitals and the like. But still acquiring enough land for industry without government help would be difficult.”

Now, according to the NAC, the government will do this job in toto for a private project, provided the company shows it has the approval of 70 per cent people whose land is being acquired. The cost of acquisition would be borne by the company as well as the r&r costs (which the NAC has calculated would come to 1 or 2 per cent of a project’s entire cost). All this has huge implications for private purchase of land.

Still, it wasn’t easy getting even here given the mood in the NAC. A day after the meeting, Saxena said that private players should be kept out of acquiring land as far as possible, especially when the matter becomes contentious. Private land acquisition has tended to cause speculation, has resulted in land hoarding and often the private sector misinterprets “public good”. “Some basic ideas have been clearly redefined by the current round of NAC discussions,” admits Saxena.

Acquisition for social services such as health and education, or for strategic and infrastructure purposes (the assumption being that these include highways, electricity) will be considered for the “public good”, the council has concluded. It has also determined a way to control land-price speculation and attendant hoarding—giving farmers a quarter share in the profits on resold tracts for the next 20 years.

Harsh Mander, who heads the ‘working group’ within the NAC that looks into land-related subjects, was not in favour of a statutory government intervention in purchasing land for private ventures. Government oversight over rehabilitation is welcome, he holds, but perhaps not always successful. One concern was that different people giving up land for the same project might end up getting very different sets of rehabilitation packages. Another issue is that the government’s methods of determining prices for land are not constant throughout the country, or even within states. A day before the meeting, Mander said he preferred market forces to ensure the best deal for sellers and buyers. “Even during colonial rule, the law never allowed for land acquisition (by government) for private projects,” he says.

Why go that far back, though? Even in 2005, when negotiations for these two bills were on, the NAC had discussed similar provisions on the government’s role. At that time as well, not all members agreed on what the government’s role should be. Its proposals at the time did emerge as the 2007 bills—with the NAC having the backing of the strongest political hand in the country—but eventually, neither bill could be cleared in Parliament. It won’t be too surprising if the bills meet a similar fate this time around, even though the proposals are, in part, exactly the opposite of the last time, and not at all lacking in popular appeal.

After the previous NAC consultations, the government had taken the middle path, offering private companies that successfully acquire 70 per cent of land assistance—meaning it would invoke the Land Acquisition Act—to acquire the ‘remaining’ 30 per cent. Now, the old, pre-2007 minority view that government should acquire all land has been revived. Yet, issues abound: no single bill seems to have the right formula that will find favour across the country.

The NAC majority view presents one possible solution—protecting the seller’s interest, which is the government’s job. Following the consensus, the NAC has been bold in other areas too. A quarter of profits made on resale of acquired land will go to the original owners, and this would continue for every resale for 20 years. Surprisingly, a similar proposal did not find much political favour a few years ago, but rural development minister Vilasrao Deshmukh now publicly proposes that as much as 80 per cent of profits on resale of such land must be shared.

According to M.R. Madhavan of prs Legislative Research, with land ownership not a guaranteed right in India, regulation may not be an effective tool to monitor prices or the role of government in the land ‘sector’. “You can’t have a regulator sitting on top of a government,” he says. NAC proposes a regulator-like body with powers to supervise and impose fines. It also suggests merging the two laws, which the rural development ministry opposes as it may exclude those displaced by non-industrial projects, such as a natural calamity. NAC members seem amenable; the focus is on carrying through this bill.

Still, there are stumbling blocks ahead. Land acquisition is a concurrent subject, implying that the political party introducing a central, overriding policy on acquisition would face significant opposition in Parliament without a careful balancing act. NAC’s proposals affirm state control while attending to welfare measures for those losing land. Not only land-owners, those who lose livelihoods will be compensated—agricultural workers, artisans, fisher-folk and forest-displgatherers, all are to get 10 days of minimum wages per month for 33 years, as a grant. It remains to be seen what the land-owners think of the latest stand on a vexed problem.