In a voluminous 300-page report, a committee on agrarian relations and land reforms, headed by the Union rural development minister, has found fault with practically every aspect of land policy in India, attributing the rise of Naxalism, tribal and agrarian unrest entirely to this. However, despite its composition of a mix of officials, experts and activists, the committee has failed to come up with a workable strategy that would make land available for industrial, infrastructure and mining development while at the same time protect the interests of tribals and the rural poor. The report does suggest that land commissions and land councils at the central and state levels may be set up to demarcate land for different purposes. The critical question, however, of the criteria by which land will be demarcated for non-agricultural purposes is left unaddressed.
Moreover, the committee makes much of some facts without offering proper perspective. For example, that land taken away from tribals for developmental purposes accounts for 40 per cent of all such land acquisition, while tribals account for 9 per cent of the total population, is not as damning a statistic as the report makes it out to be considering that most tribal population is based only in regions where abundant land is still available for acquisition. For an official committee to blame India’s economic reforms for violent episodes as in Kalinga Nagar in Orissa and Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal, without reference to the politics of these events, is to make much of a muchness.
The report’s sharp criticism of the government’s policy of creating Special Economic Zones (SEZs), with an extreme recommendation that all SEZs be scrapped, may well deflect attention away from genuine issues pertaining to the SEZ policy and related cronyism. The report states that much of the nearly 200,000 hectares proposed to be given to SEZs is multi-cropped agricultural land capable of producing close to one million tonnes of foodgrains. If this is correct, the government is obliged to respond and look for alternative options, but no one can argue that no land be made available for the purposes of industrialisation. India is still at a nascent stage of manufacturing development. In years to come, India’s manufacturing sector can only grow. So will the needs of infrastructure. What this means is that India needs a sensible land acquisition policy. Bad policy cannot be replaced by no policy. Rather, one must look for better options. Surely, no one would argue that prime agricultural land should be diverted to non-farm activities. In a country that has not yet fully addressed the challenge of food security and where a large number of rural households wish to retain control over arable land, a sensible land policy would be alive to such concerns. But, at the same time, as pointed out by this report, 80 per cent of the people engaged in agriculture own just 17 per cent of land and are, therefore, virtually landless farmers who need to be employed in non-farm enterprises. Such non-farm employment can only come from rural industrial and infrastructure developments. This requires land. What India needs is a rational, equitable and transparent land use policy, and a fair land acquisition and rehabilitation programme, not a meaningless rant against land acquisition.
