The day Kumari Selja assumed charge as the Union minister for housing and urban poverty alleviation in the second United Progressive Alliance government, she got an unusual gift: a set of two books from none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The books, The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital, were by eminent Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, hailed as the “poor man’s capitalist”for his work on the informal sector....

The Left Front government today tried to woo back poor voters by enacting a law that confers land rights on impoverished families who have forcibly occupied plots and built homes there. Two lakh families, categorised in the bill as agricultural labourers, fishermen and artisans and described as “very poor’’, will benefit from the law. The settlement rights will be given only up to five-and-a-half cottahs and only if the squatters have...

Investments in agriculture in developing countries can be structured in a way that they become an alternative to large-scale land acquisitions to ensure that small-scale farmers do not lose their land rights, according to the findings of a United Nations-backed study released today. International initiatives on agricultural investments should go beyond trying to minimize the negative impacts of large-scale land acquisitions and, instead, promote investment models that improve opportunities for...

There are numerous debilitating factors that disallow Indian agriculture from growing to its potential. The most critical of them, which, ironically, are not receiving due attention, are related to land. Not only is the availability of land for farming shrinking, but its quality and fertility are also waning. Agricultural holdings are getting smaller and turning uneconomical to operate. The much-hyped land reforms have, right from the beginning, been misdirected. These have...

The Supreme Court on May 7 ruled that natural resources were national assets that belonged to the people and were ideally exploited by public sector undertakings. This obviously implies that local communities, including tribals, living on mineralised land, enjoy entitlements but not prescriptive ownership rights to such national assets. This is an important reiterative clarification defining mineral rights in Fifth Schedule areas that are currently in contention. Whether PSUs should...