At the recent annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, I was struck by the fact that every time a development-related issue was discussed — infrastructure, rehabilitation, resilient housing for disaster mitigation and others — the biggest challenge seemed to be land acquisition. Particularly for countries in South Asia and East Africa, this is a major concern. In Africa, the land is typically owned by the tribe but in India individually-owned private plots of land in rural and urban areas are coming in the way of development projects. They need to be acquired by the government.
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