Now, even Mamata-di, heroine of Singur, wants Land Acquisition Act changed

Mamata Banerjee, who made a career out of opposing land acquisitions in West Bengal that finally landed her the chief minister’s job, is now looking for wriggle room in land acquisitions. Yes, Mamata herself.

The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, makes it mandatory for acquirers to pay twice the market price for land in urban areas and four times in rural areas. The Act also mandates that private parties acquiring land need the consent of 80 percent of landowners, while public-private partnerships require 70 percent.

During discussions on the Bill last year, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress had insisted that 100 percent of landowners must consent to an acquisition - which means even one person could have held up the acquisition. This demand was luckily rejected, but industry believes that getting even 70-80 percent consent won’t be easy. The Act is clearly anti-development.

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But Banerjee’s government, which is now trying to restart development in her state, is having a rethink. It is seeking changes in the Act to even reduce compensation levels by using new criteria for what is urban or rural land.

According to this Business Standard story, Banerjee does not want to pay four times the market value for all rural land. She will pay only twice the amount unless the rural land is at least 120 km away from any urban area.

The newspaper quotes a state government official as saying that “the price of land in rural areas adjacent to cities is already quite high. It will be only fair that rural areas are graded on distance and the compensation fixed accordingly.” The state’s law minister has told the centre that it has not implemented the law because of compensation issues.

But was this wisdom - that land prices are already too high everywhere except in deep jungles or rural areas - unavailable when Didi was bashing the government for not making the Land Bill tougher?

What this shows is that even that diva of farmers’ land rights is now seeking a way out of the mess she helped create - along with the Congress and the other parties, including the BJP.

Not that she didn’t know what she was doing even last year. At a critical stage in the bill discussions, she insisted on the insertion of a clause that land already acquired, but left unused, could be kept back by the state government though the original clause in the draft law was to return unused land to the original owners. Clearly, Mamata Banerjee knows that the Land Act will kill whatever chances she has of attracting industry to her state. She needs to get some investment going, as state assembly polls are less than two years away in 2016.

Her new idea, of paying only twice the market rate for rural acquisitions within 120 km of urban areas, will drill a big hole in the Act.

Given the sheer number of urban areas being created, most parts of West Bengal would escape the rural compensation rate. This would be true for many other states as well. Barring very large states with deep rural areas (Chhattisgarh, Eastern Maharashtra, Odisha or Bihar), there would be few pockets more than 120 km from a rural area. But the 120 km radius effectively means all areas between two towns 240 km apart would be considered urban - since no rural area would be more than 120 km away from at least one of the two towns.

What Mamata Banerjee is actually suggesting is the creation of a giant loophole in the Land Act - and most states would be happy to jump through it.

In June, when Nitin Gadkari, wearing a second hat as Rural Development Minister, consulted states on the changes needed to the Act, he found that there was an overwhelming consensus that it was unimplementable in its present form.

As we noted at that time, many Congress-ruled states - Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Meghalaya, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh - and all non-Congress, non-BJP states (excluding West Bengal) “expressed serious reservations against the law,” while Delhi (ruled by nobody in particular right now) wanted total exemption from it. The BJP-ruled states of Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Goa and Rajasthan wanted the Act scrapped.

A Mint report on the same meeting quoted Gadkari as saying that states had problems with “many clauses in the law, barring the provisions relating to compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement.”

Now Mamata Banerjee has shifted her stand even on the issue of compensation.

Clearly, the Land Act was enacted due to a Gandhi dynasty whim. It was not on the basis of what states really wanted.

The honest thing to do is to scrap the Land Act totally and draw up a new law on fair compensation from the ground up. But then, which political party will want to stick its neck out on this?

The dishonest, but probably more pragmatic, thing to do is to invent a wide enough loophole to ensure that half of India is able to wriggle out of the harsher provisions of the Act.