Modi govt's Land Act is a travesty, but Anna Hazare's protest is no answer

If Jan Lokpal was the rallying point for anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare’s epic agitation against the Congress and the UPA, the test of BJP government’s vulnerability to his wrath will be its amendment to the Land Acquisition Act. It remains to be seen if Anna will be able to mobilise the same kind of crowds as he did for his Lokpal agitation because corruption was a sentiment that different classes of people in Delhi and across urban India shared with him. Land acquisition might be alien to them and hence may not motivate them to pour into the streets. Will farmers and people from rural areas respond to his call as he takes out his “padayatras”? Unlike his grand agitation that also launched the political career of Arvind Kejriwal, this time Anna doesn’t have the organisational muscle to mobilise people or the ability to sustain the agitation. Rahul Gandhi, who also plans to agitate against the amendment, however, may be able to show better numbers. This will also be test to see how India responds to issues that affect its rural population. The problem with the amendment is that, in the name of being people-friendly, the BJP has made it industry-friendly by removing the safeguards in acquiring vast tracts of land. The biggest critics of the Act, when the UPA passed it last year, were industries and real estate developers. The Act, called in full “The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013”, was a pet project of Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, which he championed after the Bhatta Parsaul agitation by farmers in UP. The change that the NDA government has brought to the Act is in Section 10 (A). As it claims, there is only one change and everything else stays the same; but what it doesn’t say is that the change is fundamental and substantial. According to the original Act, land couldn’t be acquired without a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) and that 70 percent of the land-losers should agree to the acquisition in the case of a PPP project. Acquisition for private projects would need the support of 80 percent of land-owners. By the amendment, the NDA government has expanded the list of projects that would not require SIA and prior consent of affected families: projects for defence and defence production, rural infrastructure including rural electrification, affordable housing and housing for the poor, industrial corridors as well as infrastructure and social infrastructure projects including public private partnership projects in which the ownership will continue to be with the government. Although the government claims that it’s only about five types of projects, the reality is that it pretty much covers all big acquisitions. In other words, two biggest safeguards in the Act- one that protects the lives of people, particularly farmers, and the other that also protects the environment to some extent - have been removed by striking off the the prior consent and SIA conditions. In July last year, rural development minister Nitin Ghadkari convened a meeting of the state governments in which some had raised their reservation against UPA’s Act. Some arguments of the state governments appeared genuine because the Act has hard-to-implement clauses that would have come in the way of land acquisition for various infrastructure and social development projects. The key among them were the centre’s role in land acquisition, consent clause in PPP projects and the need for impact assessment studies. Reporting on the state revenue ministers’ meeting with Ghadkari in June, Economic Times reported that the states wanted consent clause to be removed from PPP projects, the definition of affected family to be re-examined and autonomy for state governments to be reestablished. The ministers were of the view that SIA should be conducted only for large projects and retrospective clause for compensation should be modified. The ministers noted that penalty provisions against civil servants were too stringent and wanted return of unutilised land to original owners to be deleted. [caption id=“attachment_2116613” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Anna Hazare in Jantar Mantar. PTI[/caption] One of the common complaints of the state governments, which appeared justifiable from their point of view, was obtaining prior consent before the preliminary notification for acquisition. Interestingly, the most notable opposition to this clause came from the Congress-ruled Kerala, which said it would be a “herculean task as the identification of land owners at such initial stages may pose a problem”. Similar sentiments were also raised by the industry. The Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Association of India (CREDAI) also had voiced their concern before the Bill was passed in parliament. It had reportedly said that “if the bill is passed and implemented, there cannot be any planned development of townships in the country…This bill is kind of one-sided, ill-thought-out doles may sound very altruistic and pro-poor, but these are unsustainable and will kill the goose that lays the golden egg,” CREDAI had said in 2011. The NDA government can justify its amendment by citing the opposition from the states and the industries and maintain that its intervention has been minimal. The main criticism against Rahul Gandhi’s campaign was that the Act was politically motivated and it hugely favoured land owners and not the states and the landless as it affected various development and infrastructure projects such as affordable housing, and assets such as hospitals and schools. Interestingly, the spirit of the Bill had evoked criticism even from economists such as Amartya Sen. In t his 2007 interview with The Telegraph, in the context of Nandigram and Singur, he had argued that the prohibition of the use of agricultural land for industries can be ultimately self defeating because industrial production may generate more valuable products than what agriculture could do. He cited examples of global cities such as Manchester, London, Munich, Paris, Pittsburgh, Shanghai and Lancashire saying that they all came up on fertile land. The states were apparently speaking the same language. They wanted land to be available for industrialisation and commercial development and Rahul Gandhi’s pet idea seemed to be an obstacle. However, if Rahul Gandhi was excessively guarded and certainly pro-land owners, the NDA seems to have gone in the opposite direction. The amendment can lead to forceful acquisition without the consent of affected people or an impact assessment. The agitations by Anna and Rahul Gandhi might not last long, but it remains to be seen if people will remain mute when their lives are threatened. The Act is only an enabling instrument, the real battle will be in the fields. Perhaps that’s where Anna and Rahul should focus whenever anti-people acquisitions are set in motion. (Editor’s note: Some portions of an earlier report have been used in this report)