Land and the problem of inequity

By 2050, India will be the most land-scarce major economy in the world, but any solution first needs to recognise the unequal deployment of land

In my last column “Building back better” (Business standard, January 11), I argued that the binding constraint to India’s development transformation was the unequalising allocation of land, capital and human resources. In this column and the next, I will focus on the land question.

The utilisation of land in India has always been vexatious. The situation is getting steadily worse. By 2050, India will be the most land-scarce major economy in the world. This problem has been recognised, especially in a brilliant exposition in 2014 in the columns of this newspaper (Devesh Kapur, T V Somanathan & Arvind Subramanian, Business Standard,