Chasing a mirage

Does India’s future lie in converting her best agricultural lands into another Singapore?

January 24, 2015 03:59 pm | Updated 04:02 pm IST

A glittering promise held out by Narendra Modi’s government is that it will foster 100 “smart cities”. Indian agriculture, which employs six out of 10 workers in the country, is today in an advanced state of crisis, yet there is little urgency in our public discourse to save the Indian farmer. No wonder tens of thousands of farmers across India’s countryside commit suicide each year, and everyday 2000 people are abandoning agriculture forever. India’s future, we are led to believe, lies in its cities.

Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s energetic initiative to establish a new capital city for Andhra Pradesh — which, we are told, will rival Singapore — offers some clues about the contours of this brave new urban future. Commercial urban development is not a ‘public good’ even under the new land acquisition ordinance. But Naidu has found a legal pathway to bypass all protections of the land acquisition law, by introducing an innovative framework for ‘land pooling’ recently passed by the AP assembly.

Under this alternate statutory framework, farmers are encouraged to part with their land to real estate builders without any payment, only the promise that a plot of developed land in the smart new city of the future will be returned to them years later. This arrangement frees the developers, and the state government backing them, from the rigours and responsibilities of social impact assessment, establishing the public good, securing consent, and paying for compensation and rehabilitation, all of which are mandated by the land acquisition law.

The state government has hastily commenced land-pooling for the new capital city, which it proposes to establish in the lush agricultural region between Vijaywada and Guntur. A Fact-Finding Committee led by retired civil servant Devasahayam, environmentalists and land rights activists visited the region and came up with many deeply worrying findings.

The state government has signed agreements with real-estate companies in Singapore, and officials announced plans to acquire around 50,000 acres of land. In Chandigarh, only 9000 acres were acquired in Phase 1 and 6000 in Phase 2. These two phases took more than 50 years to implement. Especially with the nearby cities of Vijayawada covering 15,500 acres and Guntur 13,000 acres, there is no reason for the new capital area to require an area beyond a couple of thousand acres, unless the motivation is to aid real-estate companies to make windfall profits at the expense of local farmers.

The Committee further notes that whereas land-pooling is nominally ‘voluntary’, political leaders and real-estate developers have told farmers that if farmers do not agree to the pooling, their lands will either be compulsorily acquired or will be declared as a ‘green belt’ after which they will never be able to cultivate, develop or sell their lands. All this has created uncertainty, confusion, panic and fear among the villagers. There is a sudden boom in land rates and more than 3500 acres have been sold in a month for more than Rs.4000 crores.

Farmers are being told that they will receive 1000 square yard plots of developed land in five years, worth several crore rupees. The experience of Chandigarh shows that, even after 60 years, the population grew only to 12 lakhs. Similarly, Gandhinagar has taken 20 years to grow to its current size. Farmers — who are induced, pressurised or misled into parting with their lands without any payment today — may have to wait years, even generations, for the mirage of earning crores with a developed urban plot years. And how will they survive in the meanwhile? They are told that they can survive by labouring on MGNREGA public works!

Those hardest hit by this deal will be landless workers, tenants and sharecroppers. The most significant advance for social justice of the 2013 land acquisition law was that it compensated — for the first time — not just land-owners but also those who work on agricultural lands. These are persons who are otherwise most pauperised when lands are acquired or sold. The new legal arrangements for the ‘dream’ smart city in Andhra Pradesh will once again render these people destitute.

Many of the 29 villages earmarked for the capital region are multi-cropped; have some of the best soil and climatic conditions in the country, and a rich diversity of more than 120 crops. Their vibrant agricultural economy of an estimated Rs.1000 crores per year secures livelihoods for more than one lakh cultivators — land owners, sharecroppers, tenant farmers and agricultural workers.

The state government is bent on erasing this flourishing agrarian economy and replacing this with speculative urbaniation. Farmers in this fertile farming region of the Krishna are asking: does India’s future lie in converting, by force and fraud garbed as law, India’s best agricultural lands into a mirage of Singapore?

The views expressed in this column are that of the author’s and do not represent those of the newspaper.

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