Ironies of land acquisition
The passage of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2012, which seeks to pay compensation of up to four times the market value in rural areas and up to two times the market value in urban areas, is both historic as well as problematic.
Though one has to go through the Bill with a fine-toothed comb to perceive its myriad implications, macro perceptions suggest that farmers ~ once a powerful lobby in Parliament but who have increasingly lost out to other groups ~ have something to fall back upon, against the rolling juggernaut of the powerful ‘developmental’ state and its complicity with crony capitalism as the mega-scams during various Central and state regimes testify.
The Bill provides for consent of 70 per cent of the people in case of acquisition for a public-private partnership and 80 per cent consent for acquiring land for private companies. Secondly, no land can be acquired in scheduled areas without the consent of gram sabhas; this is important since it is these vulnerable sections which have been denied their holdings and evicted due to mega government and private projects.
The most significant aspect of this Bill is the proposed compensation of four times the market value in rural areas and twice the market value in urban areas. To many this may seem a time for exultation. However, serious questions remain ~ How will the 70 per cent or 80 per cent consent be generated? How will the consent at the gram sabha be generated? Through manipulation, bribery, threats? Going by past experience of complicity between governments and private enterprises, people would be largely cynical since the prospects of manufactured consent looms large in rural and illiterate India. The payment of compensation, it must be remembered, has been historically delayed by so-called socialist leaning governments at the Centre. The Supreme Court had passed a series of judgements including the landmark Keshavananda Bharati Case wherein it held the law providing for deprivation of property must be fair, just and reasonable.
All these rulings were sought to be diluted by Congress governments through the Constitution First, Fourth, Seventh, Twenty-fifth and Forty-second Amendment Acts. It is therefore ironic that the same Congress Party which waged a relentless battle against the judiciary over “just compensation” and deleted the fundamental right to property through the 44th Amendment of 1978 should now grant compensation at four times the market value.
The draconian face of the Bill has a certain inevitability about it as it justifies the snatching away of rich agricultural land from farmers which has been cultivated over centuries and allows its bartering for mega industrial and multinational interests. It is ideal if fallow and uncultivable land is kept for industrial projects but that would require the government to ensure infrastructure and connectivity in these areas which it has singularly failed to do; the Bill in this light thus becomes an excuse for the Indian state’s failure to provide the same.
No developed economy, in its right senses, would obliterate agricultural land. The most developed countries such as the United States and Russia are also the world’s largest producers of grain. Even if fields are uneconomical to cultivate, they could be handed over to profit-seeking cooperatives to cultivate. Strategies have to be worked out not to destroy but to ensure the fundamental Toflerian first wave of development ~ agriculture forms the basis of national development and is not its downfall even in the era of knowledge societies and services-based economies.
