After a brief hiatus, following the central government's decision that land for industrial and other private projects would no longer be procured by the state (itself a reaction to protests like the one at Nandigram), reports suggest that state governments are back to helping private industry to procure land. The reason given is simple: it takes years for industry to procure land and, if a state wants to attract industry, one way to do this is to help companies buy land. | |
| Two examples are cited to buttress the argument. One is the low cost of the first "ultra-mega" power station at Sasan in Madhya Pradesh; one important cause is said to be that the government acquired the land and deposited it with the corporate entity set up for the project, along with the required clearances. Second, as this newspaper reported on Tuesday, even the new Bangalore airport faces a problem as the government has not been able to acquire all the land required to build the approach road to the airport! The moral of these stories, it would seem, is that projects get facilitated if the government buys the required land; this is not an easy job for the government, but it would be doubly hard for private industry, and the risk therefore is that, without government support for acquiring land, many projects will simply not make any headway. |
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| While none of this can be denied, it is also true that the government usually pays a pittance (in relative terms) to acquire farmland; but once it hands this over the land to private firms, the price of the land escalates manifold "" naturally, farmers feel cheated. Second, while it is true that the country needs a lot of land for development, what happens to farm production, especially if fertile double-crop and triple-crop land is acquired, as has been done at Singur in West Bengal? |
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| The answer to all these issues is the same "" zoning. Since the price of land usually escalates after it is notified for commercial/industrial use (and this is invariably done after the land has been acquired from farmers), the solution is for the government to demarcate the country into zones for different usage "" that way, when the farmers sell their land, they too get the benefit of the price rise. As part of this zoning, the government must ensure that fertile land and not-so-fertile land are classified differently, and keep fertile land reserved for agriculture. As a corollary, it has to be ensured that degraded land (few have any objection to such land being used for setting up industry) is available for use "" in a large number of cases, such degraded land is classified as forest land, and therefore cannot be acquired. |
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| Industry should be free to buy land in the zones demarcated for it, and pay the going rate. The government's job would then be to ensure that a few owners don't block the sale of a large plot of land. The law could mandate that if 75 per cent of those in an area want to sell, the remaining 25 per cent will also have to sell at the price agreed to by the others. At the end of the day, it should be borne in mind that a company like DLF bought all the land for the Gurgaon township near Delhi by dealing directly with farmers. Indeed, manufacturing companies could engage firms like DLF to acquire land, if they don't know how to do it themselves. |
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