Wrong to amend land bill: Jairam Ramesh

Terms is an attempt to "first protect our citizenry against lawful advances of the state"

Hitting out at the NDA government on the land bill issue, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh says amending the legislation to assuage the fears of a particular group is bad policy making.

An attempt is being made to "first protect our citizenry against the lawful advances of the state", the Rajya Sabha MP says.

Ramesh has come out with a new book "Legislating for Justice: The Making of the 2013 Land Acquisition Law", in which he gives a firsthand account of the framing the land acquisition law by the UPA government and the factors that drove the decisions.

He says the new bill has been brought by the NDA government by amending the 2013 Act despite protests held across the country.

"In the name of economic reforms and development, the government has taken a significant step backward in India's march to land reforms," he writes.

"Given that the choice of opting for an ordinance came within eight months of the government coming to power, this story is also a telling commentary on the weakening of democratic and constitutional institutions," the book, co-authored by Ramesh's the then OSD Muhammed Ali Khan, says.

Ramesh hopes that the government will add to the legacy of legal protection rather than seek to abridge its growth.

The authors say that the UPA government's "ambitious exercise" to rewrite the entire law on land acquisition saw a radical polarisation of public opinion - those who saw acquisition as a necessary tool for India's development and those who were strongly opposed to an archaic relic that defied the rule of law.

"Devising laws and regulations on land will always be a contentious topic. Given that we have more people than land, the subject will always give rise to impassioned debate and inflamed opinions on the form and extent of regulation to be employed by the State," the book, published by Oxford University Press, says.