Develop or be damned!

As the bird flies, Nevali village off Haji Malang hill near Mumbai's northern suburb of Kalyan is nearly 1,400 km from Delhi where the polarisation over what constitutes development, who benefits and who gets to operationally define it has sharpened with the Narendra Modi government's proposed land acquisition bill (LAB).

Local resident, octogenarian Pandurang Bhoir, has been monitoring the debates closely. "I'm glad growing awareness is raising the momentum in the opposition to the bill," he says, lighting up a bidi.

The Modi government had in December introduced several changes to the land acquisition act through an ordinance and is now seeking parliamentary approval for it. It is an uphill task though with the proposals labelled "anti-farmer" even by its allies like the Shiv Sena. The crux of the divide are the amendments that include removal of the clause requiring farmers' consent for land being acquired for key categories like defence and industrial corridors. (See box)

As the debate intensifies in faraway Delhi, Bhoir analyses how the situation affects him. He points to an abandoned WWII Royal Air Force airstrip on the outskirts of his village with his wooden walking staff, and says, "All these 75 gunthas of land belonged to my family before the gora sahebs took it from us forcefully in 1939 to build this (airstrip) for their planes. Instead of being kings of this area, today both my sons and my nephew have to ply auto-rickshaws."

More than 70 years later, the family hasn't got a single paisa in compensation! "That was expected of the British Raj, known for its barbarism, but why is this government trying to follow in their footsteps with this bill? he asks.
He wonders whether there is still a chance that his family land will be returned under the new bill. "According to it, the period after which unutilised land needs to be returned will be five years, or any period specified at the time of setting up the project, whichever is later. This land has been unutilised since end of WWII."

Rightfully ours...
His thoughts find resonance in the 45 villages in Pen, Uran, and Panvel tehsils of Raigad district abutting Mumbai where a 2005 approval for Reliance's proposed 34,000 hectare (biggest in the country) Special Economic Zone (SEZ) had led to outrage. In face of the fierce opposition by local farmers to the project, Reliance had to back out and shut it down. "We didn't even know what SEZ meant. We were painted a picture of prosperity and well-being that the company would bring if we gave our lands away. When we saw the reality, we stood up to protect what was rightfully ours," remembers Ravindra Patil of Bairamkootak village who participated in every one of the 50 agitations which resulted in the most historic win for people in the post-British era.

Medha Patkar of the National Alliance for People's Movements who was closely involved with the struggle against the SEZ and was also part of the recent demonstration against LAB led by social activist Anna Hazare in Delhi, tells this writer, "This land acquisition bill shows us how the 'Make in India' campaign is actually 'Loot in India'. It eases acquisition rules at the cost of environment and interests of farmers and other marginalised stake holders. The government has made clear its intention to transfer the country's natural resources into the hands of a few capitalists."
Citing the 3.90 lakh square hectare of agricultural land acquired from farmers for the ambitious Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project, she alleges, "This land has been transferred to companies known to be close to the government."

According to P.V. Rajagopal, whose Ekta Parishad mobilised nearly 5,000 landless labourers and marginal farmers on a march from Palwal in Haryana to the national capital, the claim that industry will create jobs and solve the problem of unemployment is incorrect. "The government is speaking the language of the World Bank, which grades countries based on how much investment they attract. It isn't bothered how about the displacement or unemployment because of the so-called industrialisation.

"No matter how many jobs are created, the government sector and private industry cannot give employment to more than 5 percent of the population. In this country, the majority are self-employed. Farmers earn a living from farming, tribals depend on forests. Why destroy self-employment? Land has to be protected to ensure people get self-employment on their own land."

Corporate concerns
Last week, when industry captain and HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh said nothing had changed on the ground in nine months since Modi had taken charge, it led to many raised eyebrows in the government. "During this period, PM Narendra Modi had a run of good luck as commodity prices plummeted unexpectedly to record lows," he had said and added, "There's still optimism among people industrialists and entrepreneurs that the Modi government will be good for business, for progress, for reducing corruption. However, after nine months, there's a bit of impatience creeping in as to why no changes are happening and why this is taking so long having effect on the ground."

Though this led to union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley immediately defending the government, many in the corporate world seem to agree with Parekh's assessment.

"If the government backs down on the bill it'll set the clock back. In principle, no one's saying we shouldn't pay farmers more. All the other contentions being raised are purely a result of political one-upmanship," said property tycoon Niranjan Hiranandani.

While agreeing, another corporate heavyweight and top CII office bearer observed, "The land acquisition bill was seen by most of us in India Inc as evidence that the government was green-lighting bold reforms for development. Making land acquisition easier will start several stalled projects and invigorate both investment and the growth cycle." He cited cost overruns of the Navi Mumbai airport project. "It is already costing Rs 5,000 crore more due to delays and higher compensation for land owners."

At a time when the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy has sounded an alarm over 68 projects worth Rs 3.52 lakh crore that have been stalled for over two years because of land acquisition problems, the head of one of India's largest infrastructure major asks, "In such a climate who'll want to come here to invest?"

He said he found the "jhola-brigade's derailing machinations" completely out-of-sync with the country's needs. "Sometimes, a few bitter pills are needed to get well. What's wrong if Modi's kick-starts reforms, creates environment for investment and removes blockades for projects? Considering restrictions on buying land are holding up many of the latter, there may be merit in the land acquisition bill and we may be onto a long-term plan for growth."

Political games
While the full throttle support by the Aam Aadmi Party for the anti-LAB protest by Anna Hazare was on expected lines, seasoned political observers like veteran journalist Kumar Ketkar point out how the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) stands on the LAB are completely antipodal from just two years ago. "The intra-party pulls and pushes are responsible for this kind of political cross talk," he says and adds, "The peasants union and trade union leaders in the BJP can't afford to lose face with their support base which is the middle class. There are others who are dancing to the tune of their corporate masters who are adding to this dynamic through their media mouthpieces making it more difficult for Modi as he walks the tightrope."

Caught between these camps pulling in different directions, the BJP has become a soft target for its own allies, particularly its saffron partner Shiv Sena which rarely misses an opportunity to attack the BJP on the issue. The saffron tiger, which in the past chose Enron over the mango farmers, not only skipped the NDA meeting on the LAB but is also calling it a "draconian" law that will finish off the very existence of farmers.

"The government has shocked everyone by bringing in the ordinance. Will oppose the LAB at any cost," an editorial in the party mouthpiece Saamna which also asked "Why is the government playing real estate agent to corporates?"
The mood is such that even smaller allies like Raju Shetti's Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana and Ram Vilas Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party are vocal in their opposition. Says Shetti, "Farmers will be more than willing to make a sacrifice for the country if it comes to rural infrastructure, affordable housing and defence. But Parliamentary Affairs minister Venkaiah Naidu was fooling no one when he read out the other two heads under which the consent clause will be removed. At a time when the government is abdicating from even core areas through privatisation where it shouldn't, surely it's not going to start building industrial corridors and manage public-private-partnership projects. Are they expecting farmers not to see through this ploy of handing over land to corporates on a platter?"

The double standard
"Why is it that the already poor, hungry and with only one pair of tattered clothes is often called upon to make a sacrifice in the larger interest?" asks socio-cultural historian Mukul Joshi. "Have we become so lost in our shiny mall-multiplexes that we don't see the unfairness of it all?"

He underlines how tribal villages in Thane district on the banks of the water bodies which slake Mumbai's thirst keep getting displaced repeatedly when more than half of Mumbai uses chlorinated drinking water to even flush its loos. "Rainwater harvesting is floated as a balloon in the end of summer when the rains are delayed and then forgotten and using sea water for flushing like other seaside cities like Hong Kong or Singapore do is not even on the agenda," he laments.

According to him this double standard even plays out cruelly between the rich in their posh highrise flats and the poor slum dwellers. "All it needed was some opposition from the residents of Khar and Juhu to the second phase of Mumbai metro which would have connected localities of Charkop, Bandra and Mankhurd and everyone from politicians 'social busybody' celebrities and the media was dancing attention. Yet look at the apathy it treated the residents of Santa Cruz's Golibar Maidan or Kurla when they were displaced in such large numbers for projects like roads."

History of apathy
There's been poor appetite for land reforms, right from the early 60s when India faced a major food crisis. Food productivity suddenly became more important than land reform. It stayed on the boil though, thanks to rural unrest which manifested as Naxalism in the late 60s and early 70s. In 1972, at a meeting of chief ministers called by then prime minister Indira Gandhi to tackle "this growing menace" , it was agreed to reduce land ceiling and introduce family-based ceiling on land, tenancy reform and other similar measures.

On the ground, however, nothing changed. In fact, in 1991, after the Narasimha Rao government heralded liberalisation, land reform went completely off the radar. "Marketeers dominated all segments of governance. They found it repugnant to talk about land reform in case it scared investors…They considered land reform laws not just roadblocks but detrimental to free flow of capital in the market. They wanted to do away with the peasantry and the peasant way of life," remembers D. Bandyopadhyay, a leading authority on land reforms in India and executive chairperson of the Council for Social Development.

He explains how the sporadic rural violence in India is neither isolated nor totally indigenous. "The violent Maoist movement in India, the Zapatistas in Mexico, PARC in Columbia, MST in Brazil, and the Hook in the Philippines are basically the 'third wave' of Left politics. As the agrarian crisis becomes more acute, the political vacuum deepens in the countryside," he observes. "Traditional Left parties, which had a rather nebulous relationship with the dispossessed, have by and large succumbed to the logic of capital, either to obtain or to continue being in power; they eschew Marxian Left policies although many still carry use Marx as a brand-name. Some of them openly and unashamedly promote neo-liberalism in its crudest form, discarding even the fig-leaf of egalitarianism, not to mention socialism."

In fact, the UNDP's mid-90s predictions on the dangers of India's ruthless, pitiless, uncaring 'jobless growth' are all now staring us in the face. The high decibel tu-tu-main-main over the current LAB often ignores how the majority of the additional labour force in rural areas will necessarily have to be absorbed both in the farm and non-farm segments of the rural economy.

"The dynamic play between poverty, food security and resource rights is a deadly mix and can easily take on frightening proportions," warns Joshi. "Redistributive land reforms, coercive evictions from land and livelihood because of compulsory acquisition of land for 'development purposes' are greatly aggravating poverty distress and landlessness of project-affected persons. Creating huge swathes of hungry, displaced, poor, homeless, landless and the jobless who are angry about being cheated out of the mall-multiplex experience is a perfect recipe for anarchy."
"Expropriation of common property resources in order to hand land over to the corporate sector for agribusiness and industry has caused 'de-peasantisation' among farming communities and accentuated the misery of already poor landless and marginal farmers, most of whom are Dalits. 'De-peasantisation' directly increases landlessness and acute poverty, coupled with assetless-ness and debt bondage," he says, and hopes we wake up before it's too late.

HIGHLIGHTS:
As of now, the government acquires land under the British-era Land Acquisition Act 1894. In 2007, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government brought in The Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill to replace it. In May 2014, after the Modi government took charge, it sought to bring in changes. Amendments which have become a bone of the contention include:

1) Excluded acts brought under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 : According to the 2013 act, 13 acts were excluded. With the new ordinance they are now brought under its purview. Thus, it brings the compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement provisions of these 13 laws under one umbrella.
2) Removal of consent clause in five areas: The ordinance removes the consent clause for acquiring land for five areas - industrial corridors, public-private-partnership projects, rural infrastructure, affordable housing and defence. Of these the former two have offered the opponents of the LAB maximum ammunition.
3) The LAB also exempts projects in these five areas from social impact assessment and acquisition of irrigated multi-cropped land and other agricultural land, which could not be acquired earlier beyond a limit.
4) Returning unutilised land: According to the 2013 Act, if the land remains unutilised for five years, then it needs to be returned to the owner. But according to the ordinance, the period after which unutilised land needs to be returned will be five years, or any period specified at the time of setting up the project, whichever is later.
5) Time frame: The ordinance states that if the possession of the acquired land under Land Acquisition Act 1894 is not taken for reasons, then the new law will be applied.
6) 'Private company' has been replaced with 'private entity.' While the 2013 Act stated that land can be acquired for private companies, the ordinance replaced it with private entity. A private entity is an entity other than a government entity, and could include a proprietorship, partnership, company, corporation, non-profit organisation, individual or any other entity under any other law.
7) If an offence (fraud/corruption/collusion) is committed by a government official or the head of the department during acquisition, then s/he can't be prosecuted without prior sanction of the government.

SKEWED LINES
The National Sample Survey Organisation's (NSSO) latest survey of land ownership patterns in underlines the extremely skewed landholding patterns. At an all-India level, marginal and small owners constituted 90.40 percent of the total number of owners. But they owned only 43.43 percent of the land, whereas medium and large farmers who constituted only 9.60 percent of landowners owned as much as 56.21 percent of land. Therefore, the argument that there will be no land available for a third wave of acquisition of ceiling-surplus land is incorrect.