PM takes centre stage to orchestrate rehab policy

Signs of change in focus to minimising displacement.

In a bid to regain political initiative and to project the government's benign intentions, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is micro-managing consensus for a rehabilitation policy.

The government is under pressure from NGOs, which are pitching for an earlier government draft of the policy which sought to minimise displacement from industrial projects.

The latest draft, which stresses rehabilitation but is silent on the need to minimise displacement, has been rejected by social activists, including Medha Patkar, Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze, and various bodies like the National Alliance of People's Movement and People's Forum.

The government is now showing signs of moving away from the latest draft, prepared by the rural development ministry. The ministry had a few weeks ago said that it was ready to send the policy paper to the Cabinet. The draft is now being fine-tuned by the Prime Minister's Office(PMO).

A committee of the Planning Commission which is handling the drafting of the policy has now called NGOs for talks in the first week of April. Several ministries have been asked to contribute.

Officials in the rural development ministry, which was earlier dealing with the draft and holding consultations with stakeholders, however, refused to comment. Our draft is final as far as we know, a top ministry official said.

Dreze said the present draft policy had nothing to do with the draft submitted to the National Advisory Council (NAC) in 2005.

Patkar said the present draft indirectly justified displacement of people by focussing on rehabilitation, whereas the original draft was intended to prevent the need for rehabilitation by minimising displacement. It was approved by the council but never brought before the Cabinet. A new draft surfaced a year later.

The NAC-approved draft had sought the setting up of a national commission for resettlement and rehabilitation on the lines of the National Human Rights Commission. The body was supposed to look at alternatives for projects that required displacement. The latest draft is silent on this. It just provides for a district-level commissioner to redress the grievances of those displaced.

The NAC-approved draft had sought replacement of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 with a new development planning Act for making environment clearances mandatory for all development projects. The Land Acquisition Act upholds the right of the state over all land and leaves the individual with little power to negotiate compensation.

The policy that is in force at present, drawn up by the previous NDA government, mentions this as a problem, but the latest draft of the UPA government skips the issue altogether.

According to the NDA draft, the community has to be assured and rehabilitated six months before a project starts so that it becomes voluntary relocation, according to MJ Vijayan, an activist of People's Forum.

Meanwhile, the pressure on the government is showing in other ways too, with agriculture and commerce ministries today deciding to back out of consultations with industry over the issue of SEZs.