The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s proposed land acquisition law, a politically sensitive and critical piece of legislation that could potentially remove a big roadblock to industrial investment, aims to address rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R), providing safeguards for both land owners and livelihood losers, while clearly defining the “public purpose” for which land can be acquired by the government. “This draft Bill seeks to balance the need for facilitating land acquisition...

-The Indian Express   For the past year, land issues have been a spark for anger and political confrontation all over the country, and the Supreme Court’s recent intervention in Greater Noida land acquisition has underlined the urgency of discovering a political solution. Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of India said at the beginning of this year that investment would slide unless land issues were sorted out. And, sure enough, FDI numbers have...

July is a month when we need to remind ourselves how reforms have changed India since 1991, from vulnerability to resilience, whether to external shocks (say, oil) or internal ones (droughts). In 2009, we witnessed the worst drought since 1972, yet the agricultural growth rate stayed positive (0.4%), nor did we resort to any major cereal imports. And in 2010-11, we are likely to have a record harvest of 241 million...

On the night of June 21,  around 10 p.m., the police of West Bengal’s Hooghly district descended on Tata Motors’ half-built Singur plant and threw out the private guards there. In about half an hour, the new government in West Bengal, under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee, took over the 997 acres that had proved to be the Waterloo of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and its allies.   Earlier,...

As higher urbanisation has long-term consequences for governance, the latest numbers should serve as a heads-up to the planners. More Indians are moving into towns now. According to the 2011 Census, the urban population grew by 90.99 million between 2001 and 2011. The absolute increase in the rural population over this period was 90.47 million. Put differently, urban population grew by 31.8 per cent, a little over two-and-a-half times the corresponding...