MARGAO: All guns have fallen silent on the land acquisition front in the State ever since the new land acquisition law under the title Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement came into force on January 1 this year.
Eleven months down the line, not a single proposal for land acquisition has been initiated across the State till date. Leave alone receiving any proposal for land acquisition from any department, the very mandatory panels mooted under the new law – a prerequisite towards land acquisition – have not been put in place so far. Sources said that without the establishment of the Social Impact Assessment (SIAs) panels by the government at the State level, no land acquisition process can be set in motion, with the new law mandating the SIAs to comply with elaborate and exhaustive guidelines before the uthorities initiate any proposal for land acquisition.
A senior revenue official told Herald that the SIAs have not been established in the State for want of any guidelines from the Centre. “The State has not received any guidelines so far how to constitute the Social Impact Assessment units. We had only received a copy of the draft rules on the implementation of the new law. Draft rules are not final and since then we have heard nothing from the Centre on the rules till date,” the official said.
While emphasising that the things will start moving only after receiving the guidelines and the rules on the matter, the official informed that the government had correspondence with the centre, but has not received any reply so far. “We have the new law in place, but we are yet to receive the rules which will facilitate implementation of the new law,” remarked the revenue official, while confirming that not a single land acquisition proposal has been initiated in the State since the new law came into force in January this year.
Besides elaborate guidelines how to go about the land acquisition process, the new law has envisaged market value, at least one to two times the market value for land acquired in rural areas and at least one time the market value for land acquired in urban areas.
Incidentally, revenue officials in the district Collectorate, South said not a single proposal for land acquisition has been received from any department till date. Here, officials are only trying to cap the land acquisition proceedings already underway under the old Act, sources in the know said. An example is the NIT project in Cuncolim. Though the process for land acquisition was set in motion under the old Act, the proposal is now being processed under the new law since the final award was not pronounced before the new Act came into force from January this year. Sources in the district Collectorate informed that the land acquisition process for the NIT project is in the final stages of pronouncing the Award.
