A day after the UPA?s key ally and Union railway minister Mamata Banerjee threatened to walk out of a meeting of the Union Cabinet over the Land Acquisition Amendment Bill and the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill, road transport and highways minister Kamal Nath said the government would still try to introduce the two Bills in the current session of Parliament.
?It will go to the Standing Committee of Parliament in its current form,? he said on Friday on the sidelines of an IDFC seminar, when asked about the two Bills.
To pacify Banerjee, the Cabinet had on Thursday promised that the two bills would be tabled in Parliament and then referred to the parliamentary standing committee. ?The question is whether the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill is better than the previous Bill. Does it address other issues? There are some issues and we will have a look at it again,? Nath said.
The UPA in its second term is keen to get the two Bills enacted as soon as possible as although the twill legislations were passed in by the last Lok Sabha, they had lapsed when the elections were announced and could not be tabled in the Rajya Sabha. The Resettlement and Rehabilitation and Land Acquisition Amendment Bills, aimed at preventing large scale displacement of people during land acquisition for projects like special economic zones, allow states to acquire 30% of land for private developers only after the developers had acquired 70% directly from farmers.
President Pratibha Devisingh Patil too had indicated that the Bills would be a priority for the UPA. ?It will be our endeavour to have these bills reintroduced and enacted in the budget session of Parliament,? she had said in her address to the Parliament.