The bloody farmer-police clashes over land acquisition along Uttar Pradesh’s Yamuna Expressway, spreading from Greater Noida to Agra and Aligarh, shows the issue still burns while the government fiddles. The land acquisition legislation it had drafted, which it hopes to table in the next session of Parliament, is, however, weighted against the poor — just as the initial Lokpal Bill official draft was soft on the corrupt.

Last weekend’s clashes in Greater Noida and elsewhere should remind us that enactment of a fair, equitable land acquisition law cannot be put on the backburner forever. The UP farmers were agitating since January for a fair compensation package: for the state to dismiss this as the work of mischief-makers and use brutal force against them is suicidal.
Land is, of course, needed for the nation to develop, and while ideally it should be acquired through market processes wherever possible, there will be occasions when the state must step in. The purpose of such a law is twofold: to ensure the state gets the land it needs for a public purpose — construction of a road, rail line or other infrastructure; and those who surrender it are paid its current market value, so they too enjoy the fruits of development. Too often, though, while land is acquired for one reason, it is then used for a different purpose: some people make a lot of money, but not those to whom it originally belonged. How hard would it be to ensure that if land is compulsorily acquired for a stated purpose, if later the state finds no further need for it, that it be returned to the owner at the price it was acquired at? This would ensure that those in authority do not use land acquisition laws for commercial exploitation through the backdoor!
The government could talk to civil society figures who have done pioneering work and have suggested alternative development paths. Take special economic zones: do they really ensure development, or are they a form of “land grab” by the powerful? It is estimated the 40 lakhs acres of land taken for SEZs has produced five lakh jobs with an investment of `100,000 crores — an expenditure of `20 lakhs per job. Its effect on people losing their land can be devastating: one West Bengal study shows a 45 per cent fall in access to work, 50 per cent rise in poverty, 60 per cent children leaving school to work to supplement family incomes, and women forced to become sex workers. This is not the development we need! It’s a telling sign that the government still relies on a British colonial law of 1894, as amended in 1984, giving it the power to acquire land for private industry. The draft new bill only reinforces the colonial concept of “eminent domain” — compensation at market value, which the Supreme Court described as the registered price of the land in the preceding three years. It is an open secret across India that barely 40 per cent of land prices are registered. And what about backward areas? Do people there not have the same rights to live their lives with dignity — guaranteed to all under our Constitution? Since Independence till 2000, not even 20 per cent of those displaced for development have been resettled and rehabilitated. Do we really want to add to their numbers?
It will be interesting, incidentally, to see what line Mamata Banerjee, who in a matter of days might come to power in Kolkata, takes on the issue. Almost singlehandedly she stalled enactment of a law she considers unfair to poor farmers. Now that she is on the cusp of power in West Bengal, which like many other states desperately needs development, is there some rethink by her in the offing?