-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday accused the Modi government of surreptitiously restoring a century-old British law on land acquisition even as the party brainstormed on "weakening" of UPA's "aam aadmi" policies, firmly adopting a left-of-centre approach to take on BJP. Congress appears set to launch an agitation against the NDA government's policies of coal mine auctions, liberalized land acquisition, Forest Rights Act and a restructured...

-The Hindu The recent ordinance amending the Land Acquisition Act has exempted several categories of projects from the requirements of owners' consent and social impact assessment before acquiring land. Officials, however, say norms are yet to be worked out to ensure that only the bare minimum of the land required is acquired. The Act excluded private hospitals, educational institutions and hotels from the category of infrastructure projects. Under the ordinance, public-private projects...

-The Hindu They wabted the govt to table the proposed amendments to the Land Acquisition Act, 2013, in Parliament so that they can be "democratically" discussed. A group of concerned citizens has written to President Pranab Mukherjee to "rethink and reject" the Ordinance which seeks to amend the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. In a letter to the President, the group has urged him to advise the government to table the proposed amendments...

-FirstPost.com One of the fears that has been raised in the aftermath of the government promulgating an ordinance to amend the Land Acquisition Act is that land will be taken away for other purposes and given that, the amount of land used for farming will come down dramatically. This is a very specious argument that is being made. Data from World Bank shows that around 60.3 percent of India's land area is...

The tribal or the Scheduled Tribe communities constitute only 8.6 percent of India's population and yet, they are around 40 percent of those displaced due to ‘development’ projects. In the midst of a raging debate on the new Land Acquisition Ordinance, a new report brings out many such paradoxes of development versus displacement of India’s indigenous or Adivasi people. The report exposes the anomalies of land alienation, displacement and forced...