What happened to Land Acquisition in India?

What happened to Land Acquisition in India?

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Abhijit Guha

Former Professor in Anthropology, Vidyasagar University & Senior Fellow, ICSSR attached to Institute of Development Studies Kolkata The author acted as an expert invited by the Parliamentary Standing Committee in 2008 on the amendment of the Land Acquisition Act 1894. Email: abhijitguhavuanthro@rediffmail.com

The new land acquisition law

Nearly a decade had passed and several interesting developments took place on the land acquisition issue in India. The much awaited new land acquisition law known as Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. (Ministry of Law and Justice, GOI, 2013) was enacted in 2013 in both the lower and upper houses of the Indian Parliament.

In 2014 a rightist government under National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had come to power at the centre. Just after coming to power this new government promulgated an Ordinance on the application of the social impact assessment and consent clauses of the new law, which created a lot of resentment and dissatisfaction among the peasant organizations as well as the opposition parties of the country.

Finally, the Ordinance also lapsed and the amendments which were sought by the NDA government went into the hands of a joint parliamentary committee and the verdict of this committee is yet to come in the public domain. Meanwhile, several states in India started to dilute the various provisions the new law by taking advantage of the federal character of the Indian State as regards the making of amendments in the central law. The passing of the successive Ordinances by the NDA government (Ministry of Law and Justice, GOI, 2014) to withhold the application of the two aforementioned provisions of the newly enacted law was ironical since the BJP as the major opposition party participated in the two parliamentary standing committees, which after public hearings recommended the new law to the Lok Sabha and the BJP also supported the law in the upper and lower houses of the parliament.

The landmark law, therefore could not come into application since the NDA Government which came to power in 2014 restrained the application of the new law by amendments on the consent clause and the provision of social impact assessment through the promulgation of the Ordinance, a move which had been viewed by experts as the ‘weakening of the democratic and constitutional institutions.’ ‘The Ordinance made the new law quite like the 1894 law,’ said Rajya Sabha member Jairam Ramesh.

The Amendment Bill was introduced in Parliament on February 24, 2015 and passed in the Lok Sabha. But it could not be passed in the Rajya Sabha and was referred to the Joint Committee of Parliament. In its several sittings, the committee could not reach a consensus. The fate of the Amendment Bill now rests with the Joint Committee of Parliament.  Just after coming to power this new government promulgated an Ordinance on the application of the social impact assessment and consent clauses of the new law, which created a lot of resentment and dissatisfaction among the peasant organizations as well as the opposition parties of the country. Finally, the Ordinance also lapsed and the amendments which were sought by the NDA government went into the hands of a joint parliamentary committee. The verdict of this committee is yet to come in the public domain.

Weakening the new central law

Meanwhile, several states in India started to dilute the various provisions the new law by taking advantage of the federal character of the Indian State as regards the making of amendments in the central law. Rights of the peasants are again being endangered even under the regime of a pro-peasant land acquisition law in India. It was at this crucial juncture that opportunity again came to me to encounter Mr. Jayram Ramesh, the former the central government Minister of Rural Development on the second day in a national conference organized by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a major think tank of India during October 25-26, 2018 at the posh India Habitat Centre, New Delhi Narendra Singh Tomar, the present Minister of Rural

Development of the NDA government did not come in the conference. I was invited in the conference to participate and give my views on the new law.

The meeting was held to ‘review and collate ideas and suggestions from the researchers, administrators, bureaucrats, judges, lawyers and policy makers on the implementation of the new law on land acquisition and rehabilitation’ said Dr. Preeti Jain Das, Senior Fellow, TERI. The deliberations of the participants in the conference revealed both the merits and complications around the implementation of the new law. Almost all the speakers and the participants vociferously recorded their dissatisfaction as regards the poor and backdated management of the land records that seemed to stand in the way of identifying the project affected people, since under the new law a whole series of beneficiaries have to be compensated through a social impact assessment study.

It was quite interesting to see the extreme difference of opinion between H.S. Meena, Joint Secretary, Department of Land Resources, Govt. of India and Dr. Mahesh Kumar of the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce (FICCI) on the new land acquisition law. While Meena highlighted the successful implementation of the new legislation by citing many empirical instances from his own experience, Dr. Mahesh Kumar literally castigated the ‘complex and cumbersome’ provisions of the law which according to him will unnecessarily ‘delay’ the process of business investment to a large extent.

Dr. Jayram Ramesh on the other hand concluded his keynote address by saying: ‘Both the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and Medha Patkar were dissatisfied with the new law for opposite reasons. While Patkar viewed the legislation as retrogressive the CII regarded the same as too much progressive and that proved the law was in the right track!’ I asked Ramesh about why the inclusion of local self-governments as ‘appropriate’ ones did not find a place in the new law, which he drafted? Ramesh replied he found during long consultations that the various state governments were reluctant to give further power to their own panchayats, although the states in general wanted more power in their hands to ensure the federal structure of the country. ‘Our decentralisation ends at the level of the state not below’ quipped Ramesh! He, however agreed with my observations that the new law also required simultaneous research on its implementation as I exemplified from the findings of my own study in the villages of West Medinipur how the onetime compensation money was used up by the poor land losers in sheer domestic consumption, which made them poorer.  Ramesh seemed to concur that this would not have happened if the land losers were also made shareholders of the company and given annuity at regular intervals as suggested by Michael Cernea in his concept ‘financing for development’.

(Mis)Use of the Federal Character

I now quote from a recent report published in Down To Earth in 2019, which revealed the current scenario around the implementation of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013

‘Five years after the Act was introduced, Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) filed Right to Information (RTI) queries with 28 states. The questions were commonplace which could fetch straight answers—under which law was land being acquired; were social impact assessments conducted; were people’s consent taken; which projects were in the pipeline; and, how much land was acquired under RFCTLARR Act. State governments took months to send their replies. Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh did not reply at all.

CSE investigation reveals that seven states—Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh—have bypassed the law and implemented their own Acts by replicating the Ordinance.

The latest to change its law is Andhra Pradesh. The state was complying with the Central Act, conducting social impact assessments and taking people’s consent until July 23, 2018 when Andhra Pradesh received the President’s assent on its amendment Act. Now, the amended Act exempts defence, rural infrastructure, affordable housing, industrial corridors or industrial projects from social impact assessment and consent. The Act lays down provisions for voluntary acquisition or private negotiations, and reduces the gram sabha’s role to giving advice.

Jharkhand passed its own Act about a month before Andhra Pradesh. Jharkhand’s Amendment Bill was presented to the President twice. The Bill brazenly overlooked the five pillars of RFCTLARR Act. Within a year, it was enacted with only slight changes. Now Jharkhand, too, does not need to conduct social impact assessment to acquire land for schools, hospitals, irrigation projects and housing for the economically weaker section; the gram sabha’s only role is to give advice.

In lieu of a conclusion

Are we then back to square one? The colonial legislation enabled the central and the state governments of India in pre- and post-colonial periods to use the eminent domain of the state to acquire privately owned land for public purpose in lieu of monetary compensation determined on the basis of previous market price of the land. There was no provision for rehabilitation of the displaced and dispossessed farmers and land dependent families (landless agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, artisans etc.) in the colonial law nor was there any provision for getting the consent of the private owners before the acquisition. One of the root causes of farmers’ agitation which often turned into violent conflicts between the state and the people in pre- and post-colonial India lay in the forcible expropriation of land for various kinds of development projects, which without rehabilitation created more pains than gains for the people who lost their livelihoods in the process. But what we are doing with the new law, a better and a progressive one?

Anyone interested can use the following weblink:

https://www.amazon.in/Encountering-Land-Grab-Ethnographic-Journey/dp/9390729386/ref=sr_1_4? qid=1651089832&refinements=p_lbr_books_authors_browse-bin%3AAbhijit+Guha&s=books&sr=1-4

Tags: #LandAcquisition #India #JPC #AbhijitGuha

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