The Land Acquisition Act, 1894, was meant to help the government acquire land for projects of public interest like building roads and railway tracks. Now the Act is used to forcibly take control of land on behalf of companies.
The government acquiring certain land for a SEZ is still understandable, but why should it be seen as an agent of commercial interests? The Centre proposes to lay down guidelines for land acquisition and to ensure that the SEZs also have sufficient social infrastructure like schools, hospitals, roads and parks.
The forces of globalization see the Indian real estate sector as a bonanza; land prices are by international standards low, and now is the time to make sure that the future increase in prices will benefit global capital and the not the residents.
Using “development†as dress, compliant state governments are put to use, invoking colonial statutes to seize vast properties juridical. In these obscene deals, for each lakh of Reliance or Tata or Goldman Sachs future real estate profits, a thousand or more of poor rural residents are driven from their lands into the slums.
The resistance of the victims of land grabs for private profit is growing, and, as it becomes more visible, it shall encourage those who, thinking themselves isolated, fear to defend their land in the face of the police, the judiciary, the state governments, and global capital. In West Bengal, it is on these plots of agricultural land that the left government’s deal with globalization faces an unavoidable contradiction. Marxists must see this clearly, and from the perspective of the victims.
The Indian government has permitted over 400 proposed Special Economic Zones (SEZs) all over the country. By distorting a sound SEZ policy formulated by the previous government, it has allowed many promoters to turn SEZs into the biggest land-grab racket in India.
This is evident from the fact that, under the framework of SEZs, the promoters are allowed to retain as much as 65%-75% of the acquired land for non-processing purposes – namely, for purposes other than the industries and services for which the SEZ is sought to be established.
All the attractive incentives available to the processing zone will also be available to the All the non–processing zones.The issues concerning Sezs and land have been highlighted by Political parties, senior government ministers, economists, analysts and activists.
They are sharply divided on both policy and opinions. The grant of approvals to SEZ projects across the country at breakneck speed has given rise to suspicions of extraneous factors playing a role and of business houses amassing large numbers of projects simply to obstruct the ground.
As of now, the Board of Approvals has given “formal approvals†to 237 SEZ projects and “in principle approvals†to another 168. Thus as many as 400 SEZ proposals are in the pipeline. However, it appears that apart from the pre-existing 16 export processing zones which had been functioning before the passing of the 2005 Act, only 25 of the formally approved projects have been notified.
The other projects are still in run-up stages and it is difficult to say how many of them will be seriously pursued. On the other hand, it is surprising to see that in many cases the action for acquisition of land has been progressing rapidly even though the project has not yet been approved.
The eagerness of developers to amass land, particularly in projects adjoining major urban centers, has raised eye brows of people across the country and has, in fact, made a Union minister to term the promotion of SEZs as a “land scamâ€. According to him, the SEZs serve as a ploy to hand over huge tracts of agricultural land to corporate big wigs.
The tearing hurry with which SEZ projects have been approved, obviously without adequate scrutiny and some even without endorsement by the state governments concerned or at variance with their recommendations, lends credence to charges of corruption in the process. It should have been expected that by providing the SEZ policy on a statutory basis the Government would impart a sharper purpose to it.
It is unfortunate that what seems to have really happened is that a scramble has-been generated among developers to make quick profits by exploiting cheaply acquired land for real estate development and little attention has been paid to achieving the real objective of generating industrial investments for the purpose of export.
