The lie of the land

In the run-up to the promulgation of an ordinance to amend the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Act, the ministry of road and surface transport issued a white paper, blaming the new law for stalling sanctioned projects to the rune of over Rs 4 lakh crore.

The law became a whipping boy for all infrastructure-related ministries which blamed it for stalled projects. The industry too kept ranting that the law made any acquisition of land for industrial purposes “impossible”. And many of these lamentations were not far from truth, as the white paper informally released the media a few months earlier stated that many road projects in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere remained stalled, as land could not be acquired.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi winning the “growth” mandate in May this year, the proponents of the new law, who believed that the land-holding farmers made significant political constituency, were suddenly out of power. The BJP was well aware that 80 per cent of the farmers hardly owned land of more than five acre size and, thus, doing away with the apparently growth unfriendly provisions of the law would not undermine their political base.

None in the industry rued the hike in compensation or the onus on them entrusted by the law for the resettlement of the land losers. They dreaded the clauses dealing with the mandatory consent, which was to the extent of 70 per cent for the government agencies and 80 per cent of projects involving public-private partnership (PPP). They also dreaded the clause making it mandatory for social impact assessment (SIA), which by its nature was seen time consuming and full of rigours with fear that it would herald unprecedented red-tapism in the process of the acquisition of land.

Thus, the government, which was receiving flak from a few quarters for not being bold enough to take tough reforms measures, promulgated the Ordinance to do away with the consent and SIA clauses for sectors, which essentially cover all areas needing land for genuine industrial and urban development activities.

The main thrust of the ordinance is in the amendment of Section 10(A) of the act to expand sectors where SIA and consent will not be required. For five sectors, the consent clause has been removed, which makes government or private companies exempt from mandatory 70 and 80 per cent consent respectively for land acquisition. So, the mandatory consent clause and SIA will not be applicable if the land is acquired for national security, defence, rural infrastructure, including electrification, industrial corridors and housing for the poor, including PPP where ownership of land continues to be vested with the government.

Incidentally, the SIA sought to find out how many people will be impacted on account of acquisition of land. With the amendment, the agency acquiring land will have to compensate and resettle only the land owner and all those eking out their livelihoods from the land in question would now be out of the ambit of the law.
Furthermore, the distinction of land being fertile or not will also not be an issue any longer and if any agency working in any of these five specific sectors find even a fertile land necessary for a project there will be no roadblock.

While the enactment of the Land Act had mandated the government to correspondingly amend various other laws with respect to the land acquisition, the ordinance consequently has brought in 13 so far excluded acts under the ambit of the law, which are the Coal Bearing Areas Acquisition and Development Act 1957, the National Highways Act 1956, Land Acquisition (Mines) Act 1885, Atomic Energy Act 1962, the Indian Tramways Act 1886, the Railways Act 1989, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958, the Petroleum and Minerals Pipelines (Acquisition of Right of User in Land) Act 1962 and the Damodar Valley Corporation Act 1948 and so on.

So, the segment of the affordable housing along with road and the rural electrification and transmission lines too have become beneficiaries of the change in the law. The government is seeking to attract investment in the power sector where major spending is likely on development of the transmission lines.

Union rural development minister Birender Singh defended the ordinance, saying that farmers’ interests have been protected as “none of the clauses relating to compensation, relief and rehabilitation have been removed”. He rightly stated so, because provisions relating to compensation, relief and rehabilitation have been left untouched in the ordinance, which are largely political in nature and the industry was not much worried about.

It is noteworthy to state that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had also admitted in a meeting that the Land Acquisition Act, 2013 had too many flaws. The Union minister for surface transport which oversees that the construction of the national highways, the largest network of the roads, too had stated that under the law setting up new industries will be impossible and it will take so many years to acquire land for the purpose due to the procedural provisions of the law.
While the previous government had given utmost importance to the SIA, which would also have taken into account the impact on environment on account of acquisition of land, the ordinance clearly sidesteps the issue. With major land acquiring agencies now exempted from the consent and SIA, the environment concern seems quite ignored, as noted by former Union minister Jairam Ramesh, who had piloted the law in Parliament to replace the 100-year-old law in practice till then.