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This a problem that has vexed most nations post and present. There must be a civilized modern way of legally acquiring land for development, industry and massive urbanization in the case of India now.
The Congress Party which officially speaks of the poor and for the poor (aam admi) but in reality operates for the rich elite with a neo-liberal mind set, needs to adopt new strategies for acquiring land for vital commercial use. Its a simple matter of attitude.
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Alternative to land acquisition
TK Arun ...at TOI blogThe government should facilitate release of farmland for commercial use, through law and enforcement, but not directly undertake such release. Ideally, commercial users of erstwhile farmland should lease the land from its owners, rather than expropriate farmers.
Urbanisation is a corollary to sustained high growth: industry and services that drive this fast growth do not flourish on the farm. This calls for increasing the supply of urban land --around existing towns and, in some cases, by converting wholly rural, fertile land into urban land where to build factories, office complexes and housing and other amenities for those who work in the factories and offices. And the scale of demand for additional urban land would also be substantial. If India is to become 45% urban by the middle of the next decade, and assuming that India is already close to 32% urban, around 25 crore people would need to additionally shift from country to town.
Assuming a population density of 15,000 per sq km, the minimum additional urban land required to house these new town dwellers would be 16,700 sq km. That is roughly 12 new Delhis. If we want people to live in less congested circumstances, the land needed to be released would go up to 16 New Delhis or even 20. Do we have any policy in place to release land, without creating mass protests?
Forcible acquisition of land is no answer. Singur and Nandigram and the farmers of UP amply prove that. Nor will parcel by parcel purchase of the needed land by a project developer work. Different people would bargain to get different rates, the rates rising over the time it takes to complete the acquisition process, paving the way for discontent among those who sold cheap. And once the project is developed and real estate values soar, those who held on to their land would become very prosperous while their ex-neighbors would be relative paupers nursing a grudge.
You need acquiescence, not acquisition.
For that, farmers need to be stakeholders in what comes up on their land, not an alienated, vengeful bunch of newly landless destitutes ready to strike out any which way. There are no standard prescriptions as to how to make stakeholders out of land losers. The latest Mayawati package offered to farmers in Greater Noida is a way forward: upfront compensation, a steady stream of payments for the future and a portion of the land to be returned to the farmer as built-up real estate. But it is possible to engineer even better ways of packing certainty and fairness into the compensation offered to farmers.
Satish Magar, a Pune builder, saw the process of farmers selling out their land to realtors, blowing up their lump-sum compensation and ending up as gardeners while their womenfolk worked as maids in the new housing projects that came up on the land they once owned. He persuaded fellow Magars to pool their land, create a company and build a township on the pooled land. The town leased its premises to IT parks, schools, etc while the erstwhile farmers sold services to the new town dwellers. This form of urbanisation offers the farmer complete fairness and certainty of future income.
In the absence of such entrepreneurship, it is possible to think of hybrid arrangements. A special purpose vehicle (SPV) could own the land, the farmers owning half of the SPV and the project developer owning the other half. The project could lease the land from the SPV and the rental income would flow to SPV shareholders. As the project matures, the SPV would go up in value and farmers could, after a lockin period, sell their shares to encash the appreciation. When larger towns have to be built, the land area to be pooled and the number of farmers to be persuaded would grow, calling for more complex financial and corporate engineering and a government role to offer assurance, legal backing and enforcement.
