When Jitendra Kumar, a farmer in Bihta near Patna, gave away five bighas of his farmland to the Bihar government at the rate of `52,000 per kattha some years ago, he had few regrets. Like hundreds of other local farmers, he was proud to have contributed to an upcoming industrial hub in his area. But he and hundreds of other farmers began agitating after learning recently that some farmers received compensation for their acquired land at the same site at rates as high as `8.5 lakh and `1.59 lakh per kattha.
Such anomalies along with bureaucratic fault-finding over ownership of acquired land that had been for decades in possession of families cultivating it by duly paying taxes have led to a farmers’ agitation intensify over the past week. What has angered the farmers — some of them engaged in a weeklong hunger strike — is Bihar’s Nitish Kumar-led JD(U) government’s apparent reluctance to explain to the restive farmers the provisions of the land acquisition act and show that they are being applied uniformly. Work on IIT-Patna’s under-construction `1,200-crore permanent complex at the 2,500-acre mega industrial park in Bihta, 30 km off Patna and on NH-30, remains suspended since August 27 as most of the 5,000 labourers at work fled in fear. The stalemate now threatens to delay IIT-P’s scheduled start of operation from here in 2014. The agitation has also sent wrong messages about the state government’s industrialisation efforts, especially because the government has failed to make land available to entrepreneurs for industrial development since most industrial areas in Bihar now have no land left. “We are neither against IIT-P nor against industrial development. We are only seeking application of the state government’s ‘one project, one land price rate’ policy and total adherence to the land acquisition policy of 2007,” said Dr Anand.