Subir Roy: Development and the expendable poor

NEW DELHI DIARY

The impoverishment of people displaced by development projects is full of irony. Such development is undertaken to remove poverty but it takes away land from people already poor, making them poorer. The judicial precept of eminent domain, the state’s right to take away land, was given legitimacy in independent India when it was used to abolish zamindary. What began as a weapon for the poor is today its enemy. The fight for justice for the displaced is led by civil society organizations but they sometimes come into conflict with other civil society organizations fighting for conservation which displaces forest dwellers.

This collection of scholarly essays is based on exhaustive survey of existing literature. The prose leaves no doubt on whose side the scholars are, though the empirical evidence which forms the basis of their views can hardly be questioned. Those displaced are supposed to get compensation which is meant to bring them back to where they were had the displacement not taken place. In reality they seldom get back to their original status. The aim of the collection is to argue that the displaced should actually be better off than before as development is for betterment. How are, say, upstream farmers, whose land has been inundated by a dam, children of a lesser god than downstream farmers who will benefit from the irrigation made possible by the project?

The authors are positive in their approach. They are not against development and conservation. What they are saying is, choose projects more carefully. Don’t be content with only looking at the economic benefits from a project and ignoring the systematic manufacture of poverty by the displacement caused. The key suggestions made in the essays in the last section of the book relate to how compensation can be reformed and how investment in the betterment of the displaced and benefit sharing can make everyone (well, almost everyone) a winner. And the way to go about it is to make the resettlement needed as a result of a project a development project in its own right and not a component of the former.

If you applied the logic of Pareto improvement (no one worse off), argues Ravi Kanbur, then most socially useful projects would not take off. The answer is to explicitly take into account displacement in development projects and make systematic compensation a part of the project design, plus a generalized safety net for those whom such project design fails to target.

The way we treat resettlement is more a matter of politics and ethics than economics. Herman E Daly explains that “Involuntary resettlement, by virtue of being imposed, falls under the rubric of threat rather than exchange, and thereby escapes the domain of market transactions, since the latter are by assumption strictly voluntary…. Imposed resettlement is overwhelmingly a political, collective matter, not economic in the usual sense of efficient, individualistic, maximizing behaviour.”

The problem is summed up by Michael Cernea who sees a “generalized picture of wealth-extraction and transfer from the poor to the better-off strata and of externalization of project costs upon the shoulders of the poorest.”

Development-induced displacement far exceeds refugees fleeing conflict. Globally, 15 million people are displaced every year by development, 280-300 million in the last 20 years. During the last half century (1950-2005), 70 million people have been so displaced in China, 60 million in India. China’s record in successful resettlement is better than India’s (33 per cent against India’s 25 per cent), though in both only a small minority is so blessed.

The Indian experience hangs heavy over the book although it includes within its ambit the entire global experience. India has till now taken over land under an over hundred-year-old colonial act which may finally be reformed by a new resettlement and rehabilitation bill that will hopefully be passed into law by this Parliament before its life ends next year. This bill is not what civil society activists wanted but something is better than nothing. Its redeeming feature is that it is an enabler, though much diluted, of the draft policy formulated by the National Advisory Council some of whose members were stalwarts of civil society. The killing of protesters against land acquisition in Kalinganagar and Nandigram gets mentioned in the book which also highlights the fact that a very strong civil society movement in the country has brought the R&R issue to the fore. There is thus a past to live down and a future to look forward to.

Can Compensation Prevent Impoverishment?
Ed Michael M Cernea & Hari Mohan Mathur
OUP, 441 pages,
Rs 745