But farmers no longer accept the referee’s impartiality and refuse to play the game by those rules. With both sides equally frustrated, most everyone now agrees that the rules have to be changed. The question is how.
On Thursday, Sonia Gandhi, chief of the ruling Congress Party, promised that the government would bring new legislation to parliament soon.
Under one proposal, the government would cede much of its power to acquire land and let industrialists and developers negotiate with farmers directly.
Hunger for land
The problem of finding land is a major factor holding back India’s manufacturing sector, and there is huge potential for growth if the process can be unblocked, said Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser in the Finance Ministry.
“That would also increase demand for labor and help political stability,” he said. “It is extremely important, one of those pivotal issues.”
Mitra said that the proposals are a step in the right direction but that much more needs to be done to allow market forces to determine the right price for land. For example, land ownership records across India are a mess, with no comprehensive survey since independence in 1947.
That worries industrialists, who say they are in no position to adjudicate between someone who claims ownership of land based on a decades-old piece of paper, or even cloth, and someone who has been occupying and farming the land for almost as long.
“Any attempt on the part of the government to transfer this task squarely onto industry without improving the system will badly affect industrial development and overall economic growth in the country,” Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, said in a statement Tuesday.
In the villages of Bhatta and Parsaul, just over an hour’s drive southeast of Delhi, farmers were originally told to make way for a new highway and industrial development. But problems arose when they discovered their land had been zoned for residential use instead of industrial use, making its value many times higher than the price they were being offered. The government and builders were colluding to corner all the profits, they feared.
Protests reached a crescendo at a public meeting in a dusty patch of land on the outskirts of Bhatta on May 7. Villagers say police fired on the crowd and killed three people, subsequently going on a rampage through both villages, beating women and torching houses, cattle feed and vehicles. Police say two of their officers also died.
Today, the villages are surrounded by hundreds of armed policemen, with buses and vans parked at every intersection and officers and riot police lounging in every patch of shade. When they appear in the village, residents scatter in an instant into homes and side streets.
In Bhatta, Pawan Kumar, a 32-year-old who with his three brothers scrapes a living farming wheat, pulses, rice and sugar cane, said the government had promised new plots of land and jobs. Neither has materialized, while the proffered cash is not enough to buy land elsewhere, he said.
“The most we can do with the money is build a small house or pay for a wedding for someone in the family,” he said. “Then what do we do?”
The Post MostMost-viewed stories, videos, and galleries in the past two hours
Loading...
Comments