The draft Bill for amending the 115-year-old Land Acquisition Act could undergo few changes, thanks to the intervention from the National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi. There are chances that some of the proposals in an earlier draft drawn up by NAC and presented to the Prime Minister on January 2006 will get included in the draft Bill.
The NAC version talks of fixing the relief and rehabilitation package by linking it to the consumer price index and evaluating the market price of land to its output, looking primarily at yield per hectare. NAC draft also proposes that a small amount as rental on land should be given to those affected by the project. Modifications in the draft Bill are also likely because the intransigent Mamata Banerjee will push for her views.
According to NAC member NC Saxena, the council is concerned about issues related to land acquisition, and will take up the matter soon. ?We had already prepared a draft and presented it to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in January 2006, just before the last NAC had been dissolved,? he said. If all goes well, some of those suggestions may yet find their ways into the new Bill. After dissolution of the old NAC, their version of the Bill lost patronage and was largely piloted by the rural development ministry, a group of ministers and a parliamentary standing committee while diluting key recommendations of the NAC version.
The yield per hectare idea was discussed in detail by the NAC. In fact, some argued that large farmers would score over small and marginal farmers, till it was pointed out that emperically, this was not true. ?Small farmers, on an average, have managed better yields per hectare,? said Saxena.
The rehabilitation policy has an exhaustive list of 73 points specifying the kind of rehabilitation required. Not just that all legal rights of Project Affected Families (PAF) should be re-enforceable by having the contract between the requiring authority and the PAFs notified through a Gazette notification (see box). Legal niceties which will come as a surprise to most state governments and industry as well.
Before the winter session of Parliament starts, the NAC has indicated that it will be looking into the Bill. Events in Uttar Pradesh and now in Orissa have brought the spotlight back to the vexing issue of acquiring land for industrial purposes and the just settlement of affected persons. With Sonia Gandhi having already left her mark on the discourse over the food security Bill, on this issue too she appears to be poised to intervene decisively.