Govt mulls more generous deals for land aquisition

KG NARENDRANATH
TNN, 2 January

NEW DELHI: The ministry of rural development will be formulating a slew of new rules under the Land Acquisition Act shortly, to enhance the compensation for acquiring private land for public purposes, while also re-defining the term ‘public purpose’ in this context.

The rehabilitation norms will also be re-visited to ensure that such land acquisitions cause no hardship to land owners. The immediate trigger for the move is the raging row over alleged land grabbing, under the pretext of building Special Economic Zones.

The proposed amendments will, however, also cover land acquisition for other purposes such as irrigation, national highways, ports, etc., according to a senior government official.

Currently, building SEZs, textile parks etc. which are economic projects rather than public utility services, are not regarded under the Land Acquisition Act as public purposes.

The commerce and industry ministry, the driver of the SEZ bandwagon, wants SEZs to be treated as a public purpose. “Our view is that building SEZs serves public purpose,” a commerce ministry official said.

Through the proposed amendments, the Centre will be able to exert more influence on land acquisition-related matters, even as land is a state subject. The idea is to bring in greater uniformity in practices.

“We feel that the compensation for land owners in various parts of the country should be identically proportionate to the market price,” said a source.

One allegation of the Left parties against the SEZ policy is that the present minimum processing area norms don’t ensure that only the deserved get the tax benefits.

On this, the commerce ministry’s contention is that many SEZs that have already come up are in fact setting aside little space for non-processing activities. Creating infrastructure is one of the objectives of the SEZ policy. But this is not being achieved in the case of many SEZs that are being established, the ministry reckons.

Such a situation, the sources pointed out, will put extra burden on the government to develop the necessary infrastructure for the SEZs to operate.

Rural development minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh had earlier announced his ministry’s plan to make it mandatory for the acquires of land like SEZ developers to develop wasteland in lieu of being allocated farm land.

The commerce ministry thinks that the states should ideally acquire the land and lease it to the SEZ developers. Since the state retains the ownership, it can sell the land in case of default, such as failure of the project.

As part of the plan to further tighten the SEZ rules to prevent its misuse, the empowered group of ministers may also put an upper ceiling, say 10,000 hectares or so, for land acquisition by SEZ developers. Now there is a lower ceiling of 1,000 hectares.