West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee?s first policy announcement that 400 acres of Singur land will be returned to unwilling farmers has sent the state?s land and land reforms (L&LR) department into a tizzy.
With experts saying that the legal complications alone will make the promise difficult to follow through, the department has begun reviewing the General Clauses Act of 1898, which empowers government to cancel and alter notifications.
Officials of the L&LR department said the new chief minister, who has kept the key portfolio with her, has asked department officials to find out the possibilities of ratifying the General Clauses Act of 1898.
?The 400 acres at Singur will be returned to unwilling farmers in accordance to legal framework,? Mamata Banerjee said on Friday. She did not want to set a deadline for completing the return procedure, but said if the Tatas wanted to put up a facility on 600 acres they were welcome.
Debabrata Bandopadhyay, the key person to carry out the Left Front government?s land reforms and now advising Banerjee, told FE that under Section 21 of the General Clauses Act of 1898 the authority issuing any notification could change, amend or even cancel it if it so felt.
He said since this clause brings every notification under its purview, the notification pertaining to Singur land acquisition also came under it. But L&LR department officials felt that the word ?authority? might come in the way of imposing the act since the authority in this case was the previous government that issued the notification.
Bandopadhyay, however, argued that the word authority should mean government and not any particular government. Besides this, the government was also considering local amendment of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which is a dual subject in both the central and state lists.
The Centre wants to table a draft amendment bill of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 in Parliament in the coming monsoon session. So if the state can make an amendment of the act before the monsoon session, it can ratify it in Parliament in the monsoon session itself.
Bandopadhyay said Tamil Nadu has already made a local amendment of the Land Acquisition Act, and West Bengal could follow the same line. But implementing the General Clauses Act would be easier for returning the acquired land to unwilling farmers, he added.
However, Congress leader Arunava Ghosh, a former Trinamool MLA and a lawyer, said de-notification was not feasible since Section 21 of the General Clauses Act was already dead. ?No government has ever de-notified any notification and so the section has lost its relevance,? he added.
He said there were also practical problems in making an amendment, since no amendment could be Singur specific. ?An amendment will have its effect on all acquisitions and this could rake up problems with earlier acquisitions too,? Ghosh said.
He said unless the Supreme Court pronounced that the acquisition was illegal, there was no way the government could return the land to owners. The Calcutta High Court has already said that the Singur land acquisition was not illegal. But Bandopadhyay said since the government was the present owner of the land, it had its discretion to re-distribute it.
The Left government in 2006 acquired 997 acres in Singur for the Tata?s Nano car project. But the Tatas pulled out from Singur in 2008, though it continued to renew its lease every year for a rent of R1 crore. The Tatas made its last renewal in March this year, but said it would hand over the land to the government, if some good project came up on it.
Bandopadhyay said the Tatas were only tenants on that land. The government if it so wished may not renew the lease next year.
According Singur MLA Rabindranath Bhattacharjee, who is now the school education minister, there are around 1,500 farmers holding around 397 acres, who have not taken the compensatory cheques after the government?s acquisition in 2006. But the land that was acquired was agricultural land, which has now turned to an industrial one.
So the owners, he said, required to be handed over agricultural land, which was no more existing on the 997 acres. ?Returning agricultural land surrounding the 997 acres can be an option but nothing has been decided on it as yet,? Bhattacharjee said.
Ghosh pointed out that if at all the land has to be returned, it has to be returned in its original form, since a land acquired say at cost of R5 lakh cannot be returned if its present value has either gone up or come down.
But government officials said that such conditions actually called for Law of Torts, which was not yet applicable in India.