The much-awaited
new land acquisition laws will be considered by the Cabinet next week and
efforts are underway to introduce the new National Land Acquisition and
Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill during monsoon session of Parliament,
according to a senior government official.
 |
| Anita Chaudhary |
Speaking
at an ASSOCHAM National Conference on Creating Land Banks For Development:
Planning and Implementation, Anita Chaudhary, Secretary, Department of Land
Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, said that, “The government is only
going to be a regulator and not regulating too much and that is balance of the
bill is trying to make, not trying to put obstacles in the way of
industrialization and at the same time farmers are not uprooted but
rehabilitated and resettled.
Land
acquisition policy changes proposed by the Central Government along with the
high cost of housing loans were making affordable housing for the middle class
a difficult proposition, real estate developers said here today but department
of land resources secretary Anita Chaudhary underlined the need for striking a
balance between the interests of farmers and the land developers which would be
the central feature of the bill.
“The land
acquisition bill is not against the interest of builder and industry” Mrs.
Anita Chaudhary assured. It is not a hurdle but a facilitator and enough
flexibility would be there in the final version before the cabinet according to
her. The Government was pushing for updating and computerizing the land records
that would help curb land grabbing that was a major cause of discontent over
land acquisition.
Placing
the controversies around land acquisition to the basic fact of that “per capita
availability of land has gone down drastically in the country” where 17 per
cent of the world’s population was living over just two per cent of the world’s
land surface, Anita Chaudhary denied that the Government in drafting the new
land acquisition bill was acting as a regulator and not put obstructions.
Lot of
discussions had gone behind the drafting as the aim was to ensure that it was
not the middleman but the farmer who benefited. The Secretary pointed out how
the suggestion to include industrialization in the definition of “public
purpose” had brought in a rash of several sectors to be included in it like
tourism.
On the
suggestion about creating land banks Mrs Chaudhary said that though the Gujarat
model of creating such banks was considered a model, even there farmers were
“simmering” with dissatisfaction feeling that they were not getting the benefit
of industrial use of their land.
The
Secretary pointed out that a lot land was being allotted to government
institutions that they did not need and this would henceforth be
restricted. Railways, ports, defence establishments were among those that
had lot of unused land. She revealed that Government was coming out with Atlas
of land use covering over 23 categories of land use.
To
harmonize the interests of farmers and the developers, Navin M. Raheja,
Chairman, ASSOCHAM Real Estate Committee & CMD, Raheja Developers Ltd
suggested that land acquisition agency should create land banks to
which farmers could offer voluntarily offer their lands. There should be
a data base of such available lands and waste lands with the government on a web
portal and industry could then pick and choose what land would be available for
plant location and for such land average market price should apply. He
cautioned against land going into speculation once projects are envisaged which
benefited neither the farmers nor the industry.
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