Compensation for Agricultural Land Acquired for Development Projects
The former Prime Minister of India V P Singh has raised a fundmental question. The government does not adequately compensate farmers when it acquires land in public interest. The practice is to value the land at the prevailing circle rate which normally is much below the prevailing market rate and in case of litigation grudgingly agree to raise the compensation to the average transaction rate in the recent past for those handful recalcitrant villagers. In a bid to prevent speculation, the government broadcasts its intentions well in advance by notifying general areas several years before the actual acquisition and restricts sale or purchase of land across large swathes of rural India.
There are several issues of natural justice which arise and need to be addressed here. The village folks who own the land exist in an eco system which has evolved over the ages. The low value of the land even considering the market rate and not the confiscatory government circle rate presumes the existence of this eco system. When an occassional villager sells his land, he has an alternate theme of life worked out. He may be migrating to the city and may have prepared for this for years or he may be continuing to live in the village deriving his existence and livelihood from the supporting eco system.
When the Government dispossesses the village folks of their land it is uprooting them from the very foundation on which their financial and social fabric is woven. Their is no running away from this cold truth. What the villagers need is full support in striking roots in an alien environment, not some laughable compensation money for land and property.
In an vast majority of projects, this issue can be easily resolved with a little imagination. Most Villages are clusters of houses surrounded by sprawling open fields. In case of residential colonalization, it is a practice to leave the inhabited areas in the possession of the existing owners and build houses, schools, hospitals and markets afresh. Indeed in the capital city of Delhi the concept of Lal Dora or Red Line surrounding the village inhabited properties is built in the statute itself. The developers then proceed with their grand plans surrounding the village and attempt to segregate the project from the village as much as feasible.
What is perhaps far more workable is just the oppposite approach. Full integration of the village into the project. This can be achieved easily by surrounding the village by a very broad master road which is met at different points by the existing narrow lanes of the village. The master road must provide for ample parking spaces on the village side. Next the village lanes need to be clearly marked out and where feasible streamlined and broadened by removing obvious encroachments. Titles to all village properties need to be transparently established before the larger project activity starts. This can be done with the help of the existing panchayats along with modern townplanners who can help demarcate and document property which has got built and accumulated organically over a very long period of time. The objective should be to clearly create titles based on which transparent property transactions can take place in future. All disputes would have to be resolved with the help of the existing Panchayats and the legally formal conveyance instruments executed before work on the project can start.
The next step is crucial. The village within its boundaries marked by the broad master road and with clean property titles can be declared a commercial zone with very liberal FAR limits. The objective should be to help escalate the market value of the village property to a level which makes the village residents key stakeholders in the development effort. This would necessarily mean that development of commercial spaces outside of the village would have to be severely restricted initially for a period of say ten to fifteen years. It is expected that by that time the villagers would have gotten rich by disposing of their properties at very high market rates or some of the younger generations amongst them may even be exploiting the commercial nature of their holdings thus contributing to the successful migration of the village populations to a new way of life.
With the country embarking on a rapid urbanization in the next half century, the need is for imaginative co-option of all members of society. Urban villages need not degenerate into ugly festering slums harbouring boorish, resentful, semi literate folks clamouring for ever more government support, who burn buses and othe public property at the slightest provocation. The urban villages can transform into thriving centers of commerce where the city hearts beat and around which the social life of the new colonizers revolves while blending the spice of some of the old rustic charms and the scent of traditional cultures which is sure to permeate the air for a long long time.
If the intensions are well meaning and everyone recognises the need for giving a soft landing to the dispossessed, similar designs can be evolved for other kinds of projects too. It is nobody's case that status quo needs to be maintained. Tribal life was replaced often violently by the cultivators of the soil. Similarly idyllic rural life has to make way for the more hurried modern version and it needs to be done in a way which looks like a win win to all.
There will be skeptics. How would we design a solution for a massive road project for instance, or a large hydro-electric project which submerges scores of villages and towns. The solutions will need even more imagination. There is no easy way new tracts of land can be created and indeed should not be created in the interests of the environment. The central idea should be to transplant the uprooted peoples into a broadly familiar setting with a guaranteed softlanding and the solutions will start suggesting themselves.
As usual there are easy practical solutions to the most vexed of issues. On closer examination most problems are of our own creation. Only natural disasters like seismic activities, category five hurricanes or pandemic pestilence can be assumed to be challenging enough. It seems indeed true that in this technological age all other disasters are man made and therefore have simple solutions. It is important to understand the motivations underlying the making of these man made disasters and therein lies salvation.
It is indeed shameful that in this date and age seventy percent of India still lives in its villages. It is distressing that this seventy percent is also the vast deprived majority who has scarce access to modern day basics like running water, electricity, sanitation, road connectivity, health and education. It is also true that it is vastly uneconomical to build and maintain all these amenities for the six hundred thousand villages of India. Populations who are also consumers need to be geographically concentrated for these services to be provided through economically sustained models. At least that is the state of service creation technology models today. It is concievable that in the foreseeable future with pervasive computerization and automation the cycle may reverse and providing some of these services like electricy, water, education and health to dispersed populations may become fiancially viable and transport may not remain a critical basic service with virtual reality video making face to face interaction redundant.
It is unlikely though that we would be able to leapfrog to that eventual state of bliss where delivery of services can happen efficiently to a consumer segment of one and would most probably have to follow the same cycle which is playing itself out in the more developed parts of the planet. Therefore we would still need to build our cities more imaginatively and sensitively.
There are several issues of natural justice which arise and need to be addressed here. The village folks who own the land exist in an eco system which has evolved over the ages. The low value of the land even considering the market rate and not the confiscatory government circle rate presumes the existence of this eco system. When an occassional villager sells his land, he has an alternate theme of life worked out. He may be migrating to the city and may have prepared for this for years or he may be continuing to live in the village deriving his existence and livelihood from the supporting eco system.
When the Government dispossesses the village folks of their land it is uprooting them from the very foundation on which their financial and social fabric is woven. Their is no running away from this cold truth. What the villagers need is full support in striking roots in an alien environment, not some laughable compensation money for land and property.
In an vast majority of projects, this issue can be easily resolved with a little imagination. Most Villages are clusters of houses surrounded by sprawling open fields. In case of residential colonalization, it is a practice to leave the inhabited areas in the possession of the existing owners and build houses, schools, hospitals and markets afresh. Indeed in the capital city of Delhi the concept of Lal Dora or Red Line surrounding the village inhabited properties is built in the statute itself. The developers then proceed with their grand plans surrounding the village and attempt to segregate the project from the village as much as feasible.
What is perhaps far more workable is just the oppposite approach. Full integration of the village into the project. This can be achieved easily by surrounding the village by a very broad master road which is met at different points by the existing narrow lanes of the village. The master road must provide for ample parking spaces on the village side. Next the village lanes need to be clearly marked out and where feasible streamlined and broadened by removing obvious encroachments. Titles to all village properties need to be transparently established before the larger project activity starts. This can be done with the help of the existing panchayats along with modern townplanners who can help demarcate and document property which has got built and accumulated organically over a very long period of time. The objective should be to clearly create titles based on which transparent property transactions can take place in future. All disputes would have to be resolved with the help of the existing Panchayats and the legally formal conveyance instruments executed before work on the project can start.
The next step is crucial. The village within its boundaries marked by the broad master road and with clean property titles can be declared a commercial zone with very liberal FAR limits. The objective should be to help escalate the market value of the village property to a level which makes the village residents key stakeholders in the development effort. This would necessarily mean that development of commercial spaces outside of the village would have to be severely restricted initially for a period of say ten to fifteen years. It is expected that by that time the villagers would have gotten rich by disposing of their properties at very high market rates or some of the younger generations amongst them may even be exploiting the commercial nature of their holdings thus contributing to the successful migration of the village populations to a new way of life.
With the country embarking on a rapid urbanization in the next half century, the need is for imaginative co-option of all members of society. Urban villages need not degenerate into ugly festering slums harbouring boorish, resentful, semi literate folks clamouring for ever more government support, who burn buses and othe public property at the slightest provocation. The urban villages can transform into thriving centers of commerce where the city hearts beat and around which the social life of the new colonizers revolves while blending the spice of some of the old rustic charms and the scent of traditional cultures which is sure to permeate the air for a long long time.
If the intensions are well meaning and everyone recognises the need for giving a soft landing to the dispossessed, similar designs can be evolved for other kinds of projects too. It is nobody's case that status quo needs to be maintained. Tribal life was replaced often violently by the cultivators of the soil. Similarly idyllic rural life has to make way for the more hurried modern version and it needs to be done in a way which looks like a win win to all.
There will be skeptics. How would we design a solution for a massive road project for instance, or a large hydro-electric project which submerges scores of villages and towns. The solutions will need even more imagination. There is no easy way new tracts of land can be created and indeed should not be created in the interests of the environment. The central idea should be to transplant the uprooted peoples into a broadly familiar setting with a guaranteed softlanding and the solutions will start suggesting themselves.
As usual there are easy practical solutions to the most vexed of issues. On closer examination most problems are of our own creation. Only natural disasters like seismic activities, category five hurricanes or pandemic pestilence can be assumed to be challenging enough. It seems indeed true that in this technological age all other disasters are man made and therefore have simple solutions. It is important to understand the motivations underlying the making of these man made disasters and therein lies salvation.
It is indeed shameful that in this date and age seventy percent of India still lives in its villages. It is distressing that this seventy percent is also the vast deprived majority who has scarce access to modern day basics like running water, electricity, sanitation, road connectivity, health and education. It is also true that it is vastly uneconomical to build and maintain all these amenities for the six hundred thousand villages of India. Populations who are also consumers need to be geographically concentrated for these services to be provided through economically sustained models. At least that is the state of service creation technology models today. It is concievable that in the foreseeable future with pervasive computerization and automation the cycle may reverse and providing some of these services like electricy, water, education and health to dispersed populations may become fiancially viable and transport may not remain a critical basic service with virtual reality video making face to face interaction redundant.
It is unlikely though that we would be able to leapfrog to that eventual state of bliss where delivery of services can happen efficiently to a consumer segment of one and would most probably have to follow the same cycle which is playing itself out in the more developed parts of the planet. Therefore we would still need to build our cities more imaginatively and sensitively.
posted by Unknown at 10:08 AM
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