India needs a proper debate on the Land Act
By Dr. Sanat Kaul and Prof D.B. Gupta
Published: 22:18 GMT, 15 February 2015 | Updated: 22:18 GMT, 15 February
2015
The Ordinance issued for the amendment to Right to Fair Compensation and
Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 has
raised more controversy.
The debate has, unfortunately, not been looked at from a proper
perspective.
The issues are as follows: over the last 67 years since Independence, the
nature of our economy has undergone a major demographic and sectoral change.
The population has grown from around 300 million to 1.2 billion.
The GDP ratio between agriculture, industry and services, has undergone a
major change. At independence, the contribution of agriculture and allied
activities to India’s GDP was around 60%, while those of industry and services
were 20% each.
Now the agriculture sector’s share has shrunk to barely 25%, and that of
the service sector has gone up to over 50%.
At the same time the rural-urban ratio, which was 85%-15% around
Independence, is still 70% plus rural and nearly 30% urban. This aberration
calls for a major rethink on our economic policy.
The erstwhile Planning Commission never had a spatial policy, and if there
was one, it was to keep the rural population in rural areas as far as possible
with planning for non-farm employment with doles like the Mahatma Gandhi
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme.
No guided policy
The Planning panel never thought in terms of a guided policy of
urbanisation and urban-based industrialisation till the concept of Industrial
Corridors/Special Economic Zones (SEZs) came up in the last few years.
In fact, our policy sounded more like the Chinese policy, which officially
bans urban migration from rural areas, in spite of massive industrialisation in
urban areas, leading to migrants in urban industrial areas as second-class
citizens like our slum dwellers.
India saw voluntary migration into urban areas, which did not plan for its
growth leading to mushrooming of urban slums by illegal encroachment of public
lands with slum population reaching 50% in many metro cities.
The response of the urban planners is to mitigate it by various slum
improvement schemes and by the politicians to legitimise illegal settlements
for votes.
This dismal state of affairs has gone on for too long. What India needs is
to have a policy towards urbanisation and industrialisation. There should be a
target fixed for urbanisation based on the data of present uneconomic agricultural
holdings, and further break-up due to the growth in rural population.
As the division of a family agricultural land leads to unviable holdings
for a family to wreak a living out of it, forced migration to cities by young
adults looking for jobs takes place leading to growth of slums with its known
consequences.
The Modi Government’s ‘Make in India’ policy of encouraging
industrialisation is coming a day not too soon. Massive urbanisation is a
necessity for India; not just to avoid rural unrest but also to get out of
prejudices of caste and religion so entrenched in conservative rural
India.
‘Make in India’ should be twined with an urbanisation policy to facilitate
the process of transfer of young rural population smooth with as little pain as
possible. This will also help in making agricultural holdings more viable. Side
by side, the MGNREGA should be tapered off.
Archaic Act
Coming back to the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 was made in British times and
it continued to 2013 with some amendments. However, land acquisition was for a
public purpose, which remained largely undefined. It was under this Act that
the DDA acquired village after village for a purpose as amorphous as ‘large
scale acquisition of land for development of Delhi’ without going into anything
specific.
As a result, the DDA became a land broker within the government and after
development and conversion; it auctioned commercial and residential plots with
windfall profits. Compensation was insignificant and the villagers were evicted
from their land.
Although the present Act allows acquisition for private companies and for
PPP projects, it proposes consent of land-owners up to 80% for private
companies and 70% for
PPP projects.
The new ordinance has, however, done away with clauses like the consent as
mentioned above, but it has not tampered rehabilitation. Land acquisition
excesses are well known and governments both in the Centre and states,
including public sector undertakings, already have huge tracts of land which
are either not utilised or remain underutilized.
Most of the unauthorised occupied land belongs to the government and public
sector undertakings.
Realistic target
There is an urgent need for a comprehensive urban-rural policy which should
put a realistic target of urbanisation likely to take place in view of the fast
fragmentation of agricultural land which making plots unviable.
A pan-India study basis through satellite imageries the lands available for
urbanisation is needed. It should then make a road map for future urbanisation,
keeping in mind that urbanisation should not take away quality agricultural
land.
While the Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor type concepts are excellent,
minimum agricultural land should be acquired. We now have to plan for an urban
population of at least 60-70%% in the next decade. This will relieve rural
areas of the burden of over-population, and under-employment, uneconomic
holdings and poverty.
What form the urbanisation should take place needs to be debated and
decided, and our industrial policy has to be based on it. If we do not do it,
massive urbanisation will continue to take place. In most developed countries,
the agricultural population is between 5-10%. Therefore, we are sitting on a
bomb and if we do not go in for spatial planning, we will face massive rural
unrest and slum growth in urban areas.
The erstwhile Planning Commission had hardly any policy in terms of spatial
planning and mass migration. This was a major policy deficit on its part. The
new incarnation NITI Ayog, it is hoped, will look into this important aspect,
and provide for a direction for a planned and incentivised migration from rural
to attractive urban destinations taking into account the minimum land
acquisition and use of redeveloped waste or saline lands, which will not impact
much on agriculture.
(Dr. Sanat Kaul is a former Secretary (Lands) Govt of NCT of Delhi and Prof
D.B. Gupta is at National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER))
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