'No awareness of land grab'21 Jun 08 (http://thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=209194)
Mr Abhijit Guha is Reader, Department of Anthropology, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. His views on land use and misuse have been published in newspapers and in journals like the Economic and Political Weekly. In Land, Law and Left: The Saga of Disempowerment of the Peasantry in the Era of Globalisation, Mr Guha's recently published book, he studies the effect of land acquisition for industry. He has deposed, as an expert, before a parliamentary standing committee on two Bills ~ an amendment to the land acquisition Act and one on relief and rehabilitation policy. Mr Guha spoke to Shiv Karan Singh.
Some of the most insightful aspects of your book are the passages where you detail West Bengal State Legislative Assembly discussions on the subject of land acquisition. How do you explain these narratives in a state that has, on one side, been so openly concerned with correcting cultivator dispossession and landlessness via land reform while displacing lakhs of farmers, on the other?
The absence of any archival work on West Bengal's land acquisition gave me the opportunity to look for the data in the Assembly. Since Independence, besides the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, there existed another state Act entitled the West Bengal Land (Requisition and Acquisition) Act, 1948, which is no more applicable in West Bengal. In fact, when this particular piece of legislation was first enacted in the state Assembly, it was stipulated that it had to be renewed in the Assembly by a majority decision every five years since this was a coercive law. The long period (1948-1993) during which the West Bengal government kept this powerful Act alive was evidence of its frequent application.
In terms of politics during this long period both Congress and Left-ruled governments, which were in power, renewed the Act of 1948. Another important fact is that voting on the amendment of the Act had taken place only twice: once when the Congress was in power and once when the Left parties were in the government. On both the occasions, the parties that were in power won by a majority vote. No Leftist MLA ever raised the issue of the dampening effects of land acquisition on land reforms and no MLA raised the issue of reforming the colonial law by introducing the clause of rehabilitation. The reasons are: since the priority of every political party is to share and/or stay in power, reforming a law for humane cause is always secondary and secondly, our elected representatives care little to educate themselves.
Although sanctioning of hundreds of special economic zones and resistance in Nandigram and Singur has brought limited awareness about the coercive methods of land acquisition, it has continued uninterrupted since independence. West Bengal itself, according to Walter Fernandes, displaced and deprived over 70 lakh individuals between 1945 and 2000.
You are right that despite the frightening incidents in Singur and Nandigram, there is still very little awareness, particularly among the intellectuals (politicians of all hues and free thinkers are also included) regarding the continuation of the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894, in this largest democratic country of the world. Even Amartya Sen seemed to have no interest in reforming this highly coercive and entitlement-loss-causing legal (Act). The history on the study of Land Acquisition of West Bengal is a blank slate. No one has studied it either academically or politically. It is only after Singur and Nandigram you find some articles in academic journals and those too are based on short-time surveys and/or some bookish theoretical exercise. The articles published by Walter Fernandes on West Bengal's displacement only gives some macro figures, no insightful case study or political analysis, let alone the history of land acquisition in West Bengal. The Leftist parties also have largely overlooked the issue. I feel land acquisition by the state and the thriving survival of the colonial law have been so deeply rooted in our minds that politicians and academicians might have accepted them as the normal affairs of running any kind of state.
Seventeen years on, since the first industry in Kalaikunda opened the floodgates for more state land acquisition and more industry how have the local populations benefited?
Assurance for employment had fallen flat in the Kalaikunda area of West Medinipur, since in Tata Metaliks (TML) there was virtually no permanent employment from the locality. We had a number of MSc students in the area who lost land but did not get any job. Four years later, about 525 acres of farmland was acquired in the same area for another pig-iron company of the Birlas and the land remained unused for five years; it was not returned to the farmers. Only recently, the government has started leasing out portions of this huge chunk to other companies and earned some rent, which for the capitalist-friendly Left Front government was a better option than returning it to farmers. Truly, many of those farmers would not have been able to pay back the compensation money. After this debacle, people lost faith in the assurances given by political leaders. I don't think anything radically different will happen at Singur. The only benefit the local people will get from these projects is temporary employment as daily wage labour in construction work.
What is it about the land acquisition policy that results in cultivators losing prime agricultural land, time and again?
This is one of the most crucial aspects of the land acquisition process because in case of acquisition for a private company, the company sends proposals (with maps) to the concerned ministry and the latter has the discretion to advise the company to prepare an alternative proposal (although there is no provision in the law that the government should take a referendum regarding the acquisition), but it rarely happens unless Nandigram-like people's protest takes place. Interestingly, the companies most often propose to build industries on fertile agricultural land, probably because investment cost for initial construction phase is always less on fertile land than it is on uneven, uncultivable land. This is what happened in the Kalaikunda gram panchayat area. The Land Acquisition Act, 1894, should have provisions for corporate social responsibility by which the companies may be given tax rebates for saving peoples livelihood and the environment by choosing non-cultivable and undulating terrains.
In policy and practice, why is market-based compensation for acquired private property inadequate for affected rural populations? It's not an issue of denying the market in providing proper compensation. The issue is to whom and how you are compensating, the amount and method of calculations; which of course have to be more innovative. One major drawback of monetary compensation is that it forces the poor to go for conspicuous consumption.
(The interviewer is on the staff of The Statesman, Kolkata.)
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