Of Land and Livelihoods

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The new LARR Act is not a permanent solution to the basic problem – the commodifi cation of land.

It has taken 66 years after Independence and many heroic struggles of the victims of capitalist development for the Land Acquisition Act (LAA) of 1894 to be repealed, pending notification of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (the LARR Act) in the Gazette of India on 1 January 2014. The LARR Act was passed by Parliament in the monsoon session in September 2013, received the president’s assent soon thereafter, and has just completed the three-month period within which it must be notified. But does this mark the end of the colonial legacy as far as land acquisition under the principles of “eminent domain” and “public purpose” is concerned? What are the rights that the people have won as a result of their long and bitter struggles over land and livelihoods, from the times of the Hirakud Dam project in the 1950s to those of the POSCO steel project in the first decade of the 21st century? What still remains to be won in the coming post-LARR struggles over land in the years to come?

What would potentially bring the highest rate of return on capital is the underlying basis for dispossession of people from their lands, and also the lands required by the State to fulfil its role as the instrument of the dominant classes. With the ascendency of capital, land had to be liberated from the various obstructions to its most profitable use. So customary rights had to be extinguished, for property was henceforth only to be “private”, and this meant that other individuals and the community were to be excluded. The LAA of 1894 was the culmination of a series of laws related to land acquisition from 1824 onwards, the year 1863 making the first incorporation of the provision for government to acquire land on behalf of the private sector, ostensibly for “public purpose”, the latter, itself quite all encompassing. Continued in independent India under Article 372 of the Constitution, which smoothed the incorporation of colonial era laws, the Act was amended in 1962 to give greater powers to the State to characterise a whole range of infrastructural and industrial projects as serving the “public purpose”, and in 1984 to make it even easier to acquire land for private companies. Any activity of the State was now deemed to serve the “public purpose”, as also almost any activity of private companies.

The 2013 LARR, in Section 2(1), virtually extends this legacy of “public purpose” as far as the public sector and infrastructure is concerned, including industrial corridors, national investment and manufacturing zones, and tourism too within its realm. For public-private partnerships (PPP), where the ownership of land vests with the government and for private companies as well, the “public purpose” is as defined in Section 2(1), except that they have to seek prior consent, in the case of PPP, from at least 70% of the affected families, and in the case of private companies, from at least 80% of the same. These latter provisions may be seen as rights won by the resistance movements of the victims of the various projects in independent India. But, Section 105(1) states that the provisions of the LARR will not apply to a set of 13 enactments such as the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, the Land Acquisition (Mines) Act, 1885, the National Highways Act, 1956, the Petroleum and Minerals Pipelines (Acquisition of Right of User in Land) Act, 1962, the Coal Bearing Areas Acquisition and Development Act, 1957, the Electricity Act, 2003, and the Railways Act, 1989, except that the provisions related to compensation and rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) will apply later by notification thereof. Thus the colonial legacy of compulsory acquisition will continue to apply in these 13 important areas, except that compensation and R&R will be better.

Compensation for land losers and R&R of the affected families as per the LARR is indeed much better than before. The market value of the land will, as before, be determined on the basis of registered sale deeds in the area, but the solatium is 100% (as against 30% as per the LAA) of such market value, and for rural India, the market value is to be multiplied by a factor of between 1.00 and 2.00 depending on the distance of the project from an urban area. The compensation thus takes account of the fact that the sale deeds do understate the market value of the land to save on stamp duty. The R&R provisions are also better, except that they are predominantly cash-based, and the provision of an alternative livelihood is not mandatory.

At a press conference in Mumbai on 29 September 2013, soon after the LARR got the president’s assent, the Union Rural Deve­lopment Minister Jairam Ramesh was reported as having said that under the LAA around 30-40 million tribal persons from central India had been displaced and “this had paved the way for spreading the Maoist ideology in these regions”. In this vein, he went on to argue that “the problem of Naxal menace is largely due to the land acquisition law”. If this is indeed the case, then the struggles led by the Maoists, as also the resistance of the people participating in movements such as the ones led by the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee in Nandigram, the Krishi Jomi Bachao Committee in Singur, the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti in Lanjigarh and Niyamgiri, the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti in Jagatsinghpur and in the mining areas of Keonjhar and Sundergarh and, of course, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, all have to be credited with having made a significant contribution to forcing the government to enact the progressive sections in the LARR.

The political movements of the dispossessed and of those deprived of their livelihoods and their habitats have to however go on, for the gains they have made can never remain secure as long as power remains in the hands of capital. Ultimate success depends on the realisation of the socialist project. In the meanwhile, the “counter-movement” of society against the devastations of the market mechanism has to go on to bring in place acts of social protection to ensure the habitability of the natural environment and the security of the people in their sociocultural environments.