Though the government continues to work at trying to get its land Bill passed, it is worth keeping in mind that there are some other successful alternatives that are also being tried. And, even if the land Bill does get passed, these are good ways to ensure farmers get good value for their land. It is important to keep in mind that these are not either/or solutions, they have to be tried in conjunction since no one model can work everywhere. Land-pooling has worked well in the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation (DMICDC) case as well as in the case of Andhra Pradesh’s new capital Amaravathi.
The model is roughly similar in each case. The land of farmers is ‘pooled’ by the government and common infrastructure is created by the state on this—this means arterial roads, sewerage and power lines, etc. Once this is done, and master-planning done, a part of the land is returned to the farmers—once the land is developed and returned to the farmer, its value increases dramatically. Indeed, since the land-usage automatically gets changed from agricultural to commercial in the process of developing the infrastructure, farmers stand to get very near the market price for their land—in most other forms of land acquisition, the upside is always captured by developers who then use their influence to get the land use changed. This land-pooling has been done by DMICDC in the case of the Dholera Special Investment Region as well as in the Shendra-Bidkin Mega Industrial Park. Under this policy, farmers retain the option of retaining a part of their land or exiting farming completely at a much higher land price.
While land-pooling is a good policy, it is by no means certain it can be used in isolation if the land Bill is not passed since getting consent of 80% of land-losers is always going to be an uphill task—acquiring just
32 sq km of land in Shendra-Bidkin at R23 lakh per acre took around two years. What is required is a combination of the NDA’s land Bill that takes away the consent clause for certain types of land acquisition but marries this with new options such as the land-pooling one that ensures a higher value for the farmer along with other sops such as guaranteed jobs for at least one member of a land-losing family.