The Hindu Business Line : People's alternatives

More than two months after the Cabinet was to have discussed changes to land acquisition laws, as drafted by the Rural Development Ministry, there is resounding silence on the matter. That silence may, sooner than later, extract a very heavy price if the unabated violence in West Bengal's Nandigram is any indication. Over the weekend, Left Front supporters and those from the Trinamool Congress clashed repeatedly. The State government, belatedly, announced for the people of Singur a relief package that includes training programmes for the displaced persons. Predictably, the Trinamool Congress has dismissed the package as "rotten".

It would be tempting for New Delhi to pass off the events in West Bengal as local problems that embarrasses the Left Front no end. But as the violence last month in Maharashtra showed, the danger of a welling discontent exists. Land is in short supply for the next phase of industrial activity and infrastructure because it is locked in farming activity that is itself unprofitable. Ideally, the farmer should be glad to be out of that activity in return for some other, more lucrative, options. The problem is that neither the policymaker — in New Delhi or the State capitals — nor the farmer has an idea of what the alternatives should be. Ideally, governments should have a plan and convince the farmer to look beyond the hedges of his little patch. In reality, New Delhi has slept over the problem of land acquisition though it was obvious that any fresh investment meant to sustain growth would require land. Even as late as February 2006, when the Special Economic Zones Act was notified, New Delhi simply assumed land transfers would be a routine matter. Now it knows better.

While the Cabinet leisurely ponders over the draft proposals on compensation and rehabilitation of displaced persons, people in different parts of the country are finding viable solutions to this complex problem, ironically in the very States brewing with farmer discontent. In West Bengal, JSW Steels will offer shares to those affected by its proposed steel plant quite apart from post-training jobs for one member of each affected families. Across the country, in Pune, 400 farmers, threatened by urbanisation, have built, and are managing, an integrated township through a company they own. The two initiatives suggest a range of possibilities that the policymakers must seriously consider as grassroots alternatives to official relief packages. Of the two, the farmer-owned model is more enriching as it links income to responsibility. The allotment of equity however just would not create that sense of self-worth in quite the same way. But both ease the transfer of land usage without violence or exploitation of the farmer's anxieties about his land and livelihood.

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