 Hello and welcome to News Clique. Today we are joined by Dr. Smytha Gupta, economist with Institute of Human Development to discuss the Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill. Welcome to the show. So, the bill has been proposed in the context of widespread protest that we are seeing all over the country against land acquisition or unsatisfactory compensation that the government or the private players provide. In that context, do you think that the bill actually addresses these issues? Absolutely not. Actually, the bill has come in the wake not only of recent agitations, but agitations which have taken place right from independence, in fact before independence, because it's an archaic bill which the British brought in in 1894. It's true that it has been amended twice after that. But even at the time when the British brought it in, the whole debate in the assembly was whether the state should become a real estate agent for private sector or not. And it was very clear that it was never envisaged as a bill to acquire land for the private sector. But what has been happening increasingly with the changed policies of the government when they have actually abandoned any control over land use whatsoever. This is criminal in a country where there is so much hunger, land under agriculture is going down. And food security actually has taken a backseat even as millions go hungry every day. In a context like this, this bill is going to facilitate market-based land use determination. The market will decide what is public purpose, what is land use and the conditions for satisfying public purpose are so vague that actually anything and everything will go as public purpose. There is a feeling among many sections including certain progressive forces also that this bill is an improvement over the previous bill or the bills that were proposed in 2007, where the land acquisition and R&R were separate issues. Your comments on this understanding. Actually we have to see it in the context of what was required. What was required to be changed in the 1894 bill were basically four or five broad issues. The first issue was the most fundamental, which is that land acquisition should be least displacing. That is when you acquire people's land, it should not be at the cost of the livelihoods and the quality of life of those who lose their land. So you must do it in the rarest of rare cases, you must minimize displacement and you must do it for a very well established public purpose. This public purpose should not only be there but it should be seen to be there. Who will determine public purposes then a crucial issue. If the person whose land is being acquired is not convinced that the purpose for which it is being acquired then it will always be forced land acquisition. So the issue really is that how can you democratize even compulsory land acquisition in the country. And the bill as it existed earlier left it all entirely to the executive or to the bureaucracy. So public purpose was a key issue, displacement was another very, very important issue. A further issue which was also fundamental but never considered by the government was land use planning. How do you plan land use? Because you know land is going to have a lot of contending demands and with growing pressure on land, agriculture, industry, infrastructure, hydroelectric projects, mining, I mean there are so many different contending demands on land that what is it that should be done with the parcel of land is something which the state has to first plan and only then think of how to acquire land. There is a related issue to all this. You see at the moment we are only talking about land acquisition by the state. But you know that in the last 30, 40 years the rapidity with which land has been bought by the private sector through so called open market purchases has really gone up. There has been very little implementation of land sealing laws, of land use change which you know the moment you buy land from a farmer and then you say I want to do some real estate development, a bit of bribe, a bit of greasing the palms and giving a few flats to some powerful people. The most stark example is of course Adarsh where government land with the army was given for private speculation. So it is not just private, it is not just private purchase but it is also transfer of land held by the state in public trust. So land use covers a lot of land and all this needs to be regulated so the demand was really to have a land acquisition bill which would look at land use as a central core concern and once you put this at the center then you say okay how do we democratize it, how do we sensitize it to national priorities like food security, like the environment and so on and then finally link it to rehabilitation. Now when you said this as your agenda and you look at the bills which have come, whether in 2007 or in 2011, none of them do this. In fact what these bills do is they just open it up and make it very easy for the private sector. So then what do you think is a central philosophy that this bill actually tries to address not the land use which you are saying was the primary demand? Well what this bill does, it is actually very clever double speak because what it does is it takes up all the issues which peasant organizations, tribal organizations, movements against displacement have taken up. So it has a whole section which says protecting food security and when you read what it does as provisions it does nothing of the kind. Similarly it says consent so it talks about 80% consent but that is such a sham because it asks for consent in very few cases of land acquisition and even there it is full of loopholes consent from whom, how is it consent to be got, when is it to be got and in case the consent is not got then will the project be abandoned. So it is a very very weak bill it is full of loopholes and it is whole philosophy is to actually make it very simple for the private sector to take over land because as long as they are producing some goods that are used by the public, it is public purpose so you produce shoes it is public purpose, you produce cars it is public purpose because whatever you produce is for the people, perhaps the growing of you know drugs or something like that will not be public purpose or organized crime I am sure that will not be public purpose but short of that anything is public purpose. So does the bill actually takes care of all kind of land acquisition and land change use or does it not? No it does not. I am glad you asked this question because you know there are two sections in the bill which are quite interesting. One is the section which deals with applicability and it is a section there is a section which deals with what is public purpose and where consent is required. So in these two cases what you find is that if the private sector company acquires one acre of land and then comes to the state to acquire 99 acres of land in that case consent is not required. So the whole provision dealing with consent will not work there but what is even more shocking is that the entire act will not apply to a whole lot of other acquisitions which are done by the state which are governed by other acts. For example the SCZ Act where the SCZ Act is used in order to acquire land and to give the land to SCZ's it will not be covered by this bill. So neither the compensation nor the R&R similarly for railways, similarly for highways for none of these there is a list of 12 acts which are not covered and these can be expanded anytime that is what the bill says. At that time the R&R provisions will not apply the land acquisition provisions will not apply. So what would you propose as key improvements on the bill and or rather would you like to say that it has to be completely rewritten because it actually does not address much of the issues. Well you know I would say that this bill should be rejected in total because one of the strong points of this bill by its title was supposed to be bringing together you know marrying land acquisition with relief and rehabilitation or resettlement and rehabilitation but it does not even do that. Because the R&R process the R&R institutions are totally devoid and separate from the land acquisition process. The bill is very very poorly drafted so apart from the specific issues in the bill even the drafting is bad and though it makes R&R a legal right which is very important you know I think that we should not look down upon I mean even I who so who is so opposed to this bill would say that is a single positive feature that it makes R&R a legal right but then even there it puts all the R&R rights in schedules which can be changed by the government any time and everywhere it gives the loophole of not providing it. So therefore even when it makes it a right and gives with one hand it takes away from the other it does not make them justiciable they are not enforceable so those rights if they are not given then where does a person who has been deprived go you are not allowed to go to lower courts no court is allowed to give you a stay so it is a big problem. Therefore from this the demands which we have emerge and these demands are go back to the drawing board have a bill which actually seeks consent seeks consent because we are convinced that the state is not going to acquire land for land redistribution and landlords are going to say no the state is acquiring land to actually give to big land sharks to give to the real estate to give to hydroelectric and other such large private sector projects for infrastructure development. So go back to the drawing board make public purpose much more rigid make it accountable and democratic make displacement minimal ensure that people have a say in deciding whether this is public purpose or it is not public purpose and finally make R and R as tight as possible so that there is absolutely no possibility for not giving it and do not allow anybody's land to be taken without R and R. Finally one issue which I think needs to be stated even though it is not been a part of the debate on the bill which is that who should be compensated see we are only talking about land owners all the time but you know that there is so many people who are land dependent there are people who come as agricultural laborers they are artisans the illegal occupants of land who are small tribals whose land rights have not been recognized. So therefore the demand has to be that anybody who eeks out a living from the land whether illegal or an illegal occupier as long as they are poor must be given compensation and R and R. So it is not enough to do some cosmetic changes to please us people who have been fighting for people's rights and basically have a bill which makes Vicky happy and say that oh you know we are giving a lot of compensation no that is not going to work. Thank you Smitha we hope that we have a better bill than what we have and this debate will go on thank you so much.