Calling the Land Acquisition Act, 2013 a “defective piece of legislation”, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday that the amendments introduced in it through the ordinance in December had corrected those anomalies, some of which had affected national security projects. Participating in the Rajya Sabha debate on the President’s address to the joint session, Jaitley asked the opposition parties not to make infrastructure and industry “bad words” in the garb of taking pro-poor and pro-farmer positions. “An argument is being made that the (amendment) Bill is anti-farmer and anti-poor.You (Congress) have been in government for far more years than us.You know.Please don’t create an environment where infrastructure and industry become bad words.That is the biggest concern of this debate (on land acquisition).That’s exactly what you are doing,” he said, as he defended the amendments proposed by the government. [related-post] Jaitley said the debate was unnecessarily being vitiated by the opposition and vested interests. “The debate is not between rich and poor, or farmer and anti-farmer.It is about.adding to the poverty of India and keeping India poor for the next 20 years,” he said. He said that while land acquired for 13 special purposes had been exempted from the need to obtain the consent of landowners and a social impact assessment (SIA), national security and defence did not figure in the list. “National security has been categorised as an urgent reason for acquiring land but it is not exempt from the need to obtain consent or an SIA. So, the state government can identify the land but consent of 70 per cent of the farmers would have to be taken, an SIA would have to be conducted. months would pass and in the meanwhile Pakistan would come to know what is being planned. This (existing) law can be disastrous for national security. It needed to be corrected,” he said. Jaitley claimed that some projects of national security were being hit because of the provisions of the land acquisition law. “Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a member of this House, and so is Mr (A K) Antony. I can show some files that can prove that (progress on) some strategic installations have suffered because of this law,” he said. Jaitley said the amendments rightfully seek to make national security and four other purposes exempt from some of the provisions of the law, while extending these provisions to each of the 13 other purposes which had been exempted earlier. Apart from national security, the proposed amendments bring rural infrastructure, affordable housing, industrial corridors, and infrastructure projects, including PPP projects in which government owns the land, in the special category that does not require consent of the landowners or SIA. “Who can argue that rural infrastructure like irrigation, or affordable housing that is meant primarily for rural migrants coming into cities, is anti-poor? But that is exactly what is being done. Despite the assurance given to this House, the UPA government had not exempted irrigation from the need for SIA and consent,” he said. Jaitley said some UPA ministers were also of the view that the provisions of the land acquisition law would hurt infrastructure projects and read out a letter written by then Commerce Minister Anand Sharma to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in this regard. In the letter dated May 25, 2012, Sharma had argued that the law would “not only make the cost of land exorbitantly high but also make acquisition proceedings well-nigh impossible”. Sharma had said the insistence on consent of 80 per cent of the affected families would “seriously delay acquisition and in many cases halt essential infrastructure projects”. Sharma, who was present during the debate, intervened to say that he stood by what he had written in the letter and that his objection to the amendments being proposed was that it asked the government to acquire land for private parties in certain cases. Sharma was referring to the inclusion of private educational institutions and hospitals as valid purposes for which government can acquire land.
