A rehabilitation policy for farmers giving up land is under discussion again. There are, to begin with, some obvious flaws in the time honoured, pre-colonial, but by now somewhat outmoded, land acquisition laws, and then there are newer paradigms where these laws are irrelevant, because thefarmer would benefit from a regulated market for land more than from a state policy which supposedly “protects” them. The issue is important because apart from the luddite fringe, everyone recognises and as the Punjab, Haryana, Bengal and Maharashtra discussions have underlined, there has to be an efficient and fair institutional and legal mechanism for land transfer for non-agricultural purposes. Way back in the late Eighties of the last century, Hiten Bhayya had shown in a very interesting Planning Commission paper that for capital intensive projects in the mining, power, industrial and water sectors, delay in land acquisition was a very important cause for cost overruns. First, the old style land acquisition machinery. We have gone a long way with the National Rehabilitation Policy and the suggested changes by the National Advisory Council of the CMP. There is, however, one very vexed question. To the best of my knowledge, it was in the SSP Gujarat Plan that the principle of land for land was recognised in a rehab plan. The big global debates and the darlings of the Green crowds in Europe and America with dollar denominated movements were to follow later, but a young Gujarati doctor, Anil Patel, led a movement of Adivasis under the umbrella of his ArchVahini in Rajpipla and made the then political leadership of Gujarat to accept the proposition that land for land was the only fair principle for resettlement. Involving more than 20,000 persons, the Gujarat rehab plan was a major one, and apart from Anil’s leadership, succeeded not only because the Adivasi leadership in Gujarat, led by stalwarts like Jina Bhai Darji, had clout with Indira Gandhi, but also because the state was industrialising fast, and on account of movements of workers to non-agricultural work, land was available. I have a sneaking suspicion that the later ‘activists’ have a point, because rehab outside the state leaves much to be desired and that’s where they were located and not where the action was for a decade and a half. But the principle of land for land is disputed and was missing in the earlier drafts of the National Rehabilitation Policy. A decade and a half later I was to run into it again in the Tehri project. Sunder Lalji Bahuguna would go on fast and as Power Minister I would feel obliged to go to the banks of the river at his cottage on the ‘encroached’ land and persuade him to change his mind. I would be delayed and the Air Force choppers would not bring me back. I knew the papers next day would carry a story on Bahuguna gently chiding Alagh, but one had to put up with it because Tehri was a badly planned project and apart from other deficiencies did not have a rehab plan. I asked my senior, economist C.H.Hanumantha Rao, to help and he did his work with the detail he is known for. But he did not provide land for land and I asked him why? In the fertile valleys in the Shivaliks, there is no surplus land and there would be secondary displacement. I have always wondered about this, for aren’t we, in a sense, saying that at particular land costs we can’t afford the project. I hope we will debate this. The problem is becoming more general. With the kind of land and water scarcity the country is facing and the rate at which it is developing in some areas, we must let the market for land work. We need a nuanced policy, but even the right questions are not being asked. Two aspects are fundamental. The farmer must be organised at the community level so that he can negotiate the details or be a part of the process as at Singur. Secondly, the state must set up the parameters within which he can participate in the expected value of land. As an economist I have many solutions and experiments like reverse bidding that the infrastructure boys have proposed, but somebody up there has to raise the right questions.
