Leave it to the army

NTPC Chairman and Managing Director Arup Roy Choudhury is known for his candour, but his co-panellists at a recent conference were taken aback when he said sarcastically that the job of implementing the new land law should be handed over to the army. Roy Choudhury was reacting to a panellist's suggestion that legal issues relating to land acquisition had been resolved with the promulgation of the land acquisition ordinance. NTPC, he said, had taken this route in Bangladesh, where it was executing a project for which the contract for infrastructure development and land filing had been given to the Bangladesh Army. "Nobody challenges them, so the boundary wall (at the project site) will be built. We know how to execute a project in the area inside a boundary." He added that such an approach would not work in India because every state had its own compulsions and every industry its own needs.