Land and Property

Land and Property- Zameen Aur Zaidaat

The new Land Bill just passed by both houses of parliament and now going for Presidential assent before becoming a law to replace the colonial one enacted in 1894, is bold, most welcome, and has come not a moment too soon.

It has always felt strange to witness, even if one is not being stripped of one’s land, one’s most valued possession and source of livelihood, to be  bluntly coerced by one’s own elected representatives, in an  independent country.

The Industry and the Builder lobby may protest but their costs of doing business have not gone up appreciably.What has happened is the politician has let a little of his fee go to the land-owners and farmers.

This is because he has realised, with the instinct for survival highly developed in him, that if nothing is done to properly compensate the land- owning farmer, that he, the politician, could well reap the whirlwind. The daylight robbery is not just unfair but it has gone on for 67 years too many since independence.

The farmers and rural landless, a massive voting entity, even now forming 60 % of the total, have been cheated out of their lands for a pittance, by legal dictation enforced by the state, for all this time.

The landlords and zamindars, even maligned as undeserving, were helpless to resist, except via endless court cases for those amongst them rich and patient enough to be able to litigate and see it through.

Most small holders just give up their land for an arbitrary sum fixed by the government acquisition mechanism, which works off very infrequently updated circle rates for agricultural land.

And this scandalous fraud and sanctioned brigandage has been perpetrated all over the country all this while. That it was a deliberate rip- off came to particularly rankle because the politician in every state knows change of land use is a license to print money, which he has exploited ruthlessly.

And that is what has been happening brazenly, in the presence of the hapless farmer and erstwhile owner of the land. After it is snatched away  by the government, and only then, the politician in cahoots with the developer and the CLU converts it to residential, commercial or institutional, all at a stroke of a pen.

Instantly, the land is valued at lakhs per yard after being taken over for a paltry few lakhs per acre from the farmer for an ostensible ‘public purpose’.

When this’purpose’ turns out to be residential high-rises for the rich or commercial malls, the farmer is rightfully indignant because everyone has minted money except him.

And it is hard for him to understand this state operated scam is in any way a ‘public purpose’ as in commonwealth. But then the grandest multi-national commonwealth was just fancy talk for a systematic plunder of natural resources extracted by near slave labour.

The government has put a  set of curbs to this exploitation by passing the  new Land Bill which mandates that 80% of the land owners must agree to sell to a private entity, 70% to a public cum private entity. And though the government can acquire land as necessary for that ubiquitous ‘public purpose’, it must pay twice the prevailing market rate for agricultural land abutting urban areas, and four times the going rate in rural areas.

The government is also advertising this new law under final process extensively on TV, radio and the press as a farmer-friendly move with a beaming portrait each of Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Mr Manmohan Singh on every advertisement. Let us therefore hope the government has ready money to pay out and doesn’t hand farmers an IOU of some kind! And let us hope the ‘market value’ is assessed fairly.

A likely effect of this law will be to automatically double and quadruple prices in the urban and rural areas respectively , because any private deal or public-private accord is not going to be struck at a figure lower than what it has declared it will pay.

So a land-based bonanza is at last in the offing on a more democratic basis than ever before in independent India. And like the Food Bill before it, both the  government and the opposition BJP have made common cause to ensure smooth passage of these laws one after the other. Well, well.The former has already been signed into law by the President.

Yet another law,  the Pension Bill which now allows 26% foreign investment in the companies that put themselves forward to manage and invest massive amounts of government employee pension has been passed in the Lok Sabha.

That it has been blocked and pending for 8 years for want of consensus and opposition support has  neverthelessgone through behind the other two laws above- mentioned. In the midst of a routinely adjourned Lok and Rajya Sabha, disgracefully stymied for 85% of its time in session, passing three important laws in a row is remarkable.

But will allowing pension funds to seek higher returns with attendant risks be a good thing? Or might it be much too late at this juncture, where domestic and international stock markets are trading very weak, and gains are from deep craters and abysmal depths. Besides our propensity for corruption is a perennial worry.

It may be, this hoary Pension Bill law, eight years in the waiting, a bit like securing the barn doors after the horses have bolted. But it could of course go very much better than anticipated, and put paid to misplaced concerns.

 (921 words)

September  5^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee