Assignment on Land Acquisition Management

Introduction
Among several issues that Indian society confronts today, involuntary displacement of people
by government due to taking away of their agricultural lands and other assets (homestead
etc.) for development projectsboth in public or private sectorshas emerged as one of the
highly debated and disputed issue. Several of these development projects have faced stiff
resistance and even violent agitations against the appropriation of affected peoples assets
under the compulsive Land Acquisition Act, 1894. In the earlier decades (since Indias
independence in 1947), government succeeded in acquiring vast lands from people for
creating such infrastructure, irrigation, mining and heavy industry projects, mostly in the
public sector, due to peoples ignorance of their rights, and also their faith in the political
system. However, with the growing intensity of involuntary displacement and eroding public
interest in pushing industrial/mining projects by government, the affected people and civil
society groups started challenging the eminent domain used by a sovereign state in
imposing developmentalism, without restoring meagre sources of sustenance of the affected
people. This is now more relevant in the context of market-driven Indian economy, where
governments decision of approving over 400 special economic zones (SEZs) has resulted in
direct confrontation between the shining India and highly vulnerable agrarian communities.
As the rate of growth of the economy has increased, so has the demand for land for nonagricultural purposes, and we can quite correctly expect the demand for land to rise in the
future. One would not be exaggerating much if one were to say that this single issue will be a
very important test case for Indias political economy and show us the ironies facing the
countrys development. In the matter of demand for land, India is quite similar to China,
another economy that has a high rate of growth and high pressure on agricultural land. To put
Indias case in perspective, in 2005 alone, official data suggest that China had more than
60,000 local disturbances over the issue of land. Since then, the Chinese government has not
come out with this data.
Quite expectedly, the issue of land acquisition is inextricably linked to the compensation
package offered to those who part with their land. If the last couple of years have seen more
land related disturbances, it has also seen substantial increases in the compensation paid. If
landowners are to be given a fair deal, this would have to increase by how much, this would
depend on specific situations. The Government of India passed the Right to Fair

Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act,

2013 in August 2013 and it came into force from 1 January 2014. As per this Act, the
compensation paid to land owners will rise, making the Indian economy that much more
costly.
It has been found that the capital cost of land for new corporate projects worked out to 1.8%
of gross fixed asset value in 2003, and it increased to 2.9% in 2008. A higher input cost
affects two sections:

First, producers producing for the domestic market are they national or multinational.
Since the Indian economy is still fairly closed, producers will be able to pass on the
higher cost of land to domestic consumers mainly middle-class consumers who will
have to pay more for goods such as TVs, cars, two-wheelers, and so on. In such a
case, the profits of companies will not fall.
The second category is exporters, who may or may not be able to pass on higher costs
to foreign buyers as there is fierce competition in international markets. They most
likely will not be able to pass on the higher cost, and will see their profits dip. Thus
exports could become slightly less attractive, decreasing their rate of growth. This
could affect Indias overall foreign exchange position; decrease the rate of growth of
jobs, and so on.

Present Scenario of India

The contemporary situation in India is marked by continued search for appropriate
ownership-structure, combination of partners/stakeholders and institutions within the
overarching framework of participatory development. A recent review of the experiences of
WDPs in India suggests that successful projects are, so far, few in number and have operated
under special conditions which cannot be easily replicated. If success is to be sustained, and
is to spread quickly to the new areas, new partnerships will be needed between central and
state governments, district administration, panchayati raj institutions, non-government
organisations, line agencies and communities themselves (Turton et al. 2011).
Thus despite the euphoria of participatory processes, questions still remain about the quality
of participation and equity in terms of benefit sharing. The diverse experiences from the field
have led to a realisation that local communities have to play a major but not exclusive role
in a participatory approach. This, in turn, suggests recognising the critical role of the State
and its bureaucracy to work with participatory approaches (Thompson 1995). This is
essential, not only for scaling up, but also for ensuring certain outcomes that have a direct
bearing on national level objectives like increase in food grain production.

Land Reforms
Land policy in India has undergone broadly four phases since Independence.
1.

The first and longest phase (1950 - 72) consisted of land reforms that included three
major efforts: abolition of the intermediaries, tenancy reform, and the redistribution of
land using land ceilings. The abolition of intermediaries was relatively successful, but

tenancy reform and land ceilings met with less success.

2. The second phase (1972 - 85) shifted attention to bringing uncultivated land under
cultivation.
3. The third phase (1985 - 95) increased attention towards water and soil conservation
through the Watershed Development, Drought-Prone Area Development (DPAP) and
Desert-Area Development Programmes (DADP). A central government Waste land
Development Agency was established to focus on wasteland and degraded land. Some
of the land policy from this phase continued beyond its final year.

4. The fourth and current phase of policy (1995 onwards) centres on debates about the
necessity to continue with land legislation and efforts to improve land revenue
administration and, in particular, clarity in land records.

Urban Development
In terms of geology the present is Anthropocene which refers to biodiversity. Anthropocene is
directly linked to urban processes which include the mining of resources and commodities
demanded and produced in cities. Earlier humans had limited impact but steam engines
changed the impact dynamically. 1945 was the turning point because of nuclear bombing at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also, this anthropocene relates to the fact of human intervention
biggest of which is industrial evolution. Because of this Anthropocene becomes important to
understand.
Understanding what land actually relates to one finds that land has physical attributes
attached to it such as ground water, facilities, certain aesthetics quality, environmental
vulnerability (affected by seismic conditions) and construction (depends on the cost and how
the foundation is to laid).
But, the concept which is different from land is property. To begin with, property is a
relationship between people i.e. a social relation which is given by the society and the
concerned individual has the right and the authority to use that property in certain ways (there
are laws governing it), land conformance (according to this one cannot establish a factory in
residential areas) is one such law which individuals need to abide by There are various
strategic types of property which can be listed into:
1) Communal Property: owned by community
2) State Property: public ownership
3) Private Property: if a private property is infringed then the concerned person can
approach the court
Land may or may not be a commodity but property has a price attached to it, property
involves value flowing across it which categorises this into a commodity. In a market society,
the dynamics of property has a huge impact on framing cities. They map land values and how
people react to these changes.
Over a period one can eventually see through that incomes are linked to historical factors
which lead to segmentation of

~ Class
~ Race
~ Nationality

According to David Harvey, Capitalism has two main circuits

Primary Circuit: involves income, production of commodities, selling, consumption
and profits being made through selling
Secondary Circuit: involves infrastructure or the built environment
David Harvey talks about, Over Accumulation Crisis also referred as over humiliation
process, in which he stresses on the point that too much capital has been generated but we
cannot find places to distribute then evenly.
The essential formula for Capitalism:
M - C - M
Where; M > M
M: Money
C: Commodity
M: More Money

Kondrati
eft wave

The above graph depicts that capitalism is crisis driven. The x-axis of the graph determines
the capital that is generated, in other words it represents the global growth rate of capitalism.
David Harvey, stated that during the time of crisis one tend to shift from primary circuit to
secondary circuit, which is how profit is been made from the secondary circuit; as there is a
movement of capital to infrastructure and housing. This stands true as in case of China where
the scale of infrastructure is humungous. China is the largest consumer of cement; they
consume cement much greater to what the cement consumption is.
He has constructed his theory in several steps. The major steps are:
market exchange;
the coercive laws of spatial competition;
geographical divisions of labour;
monopolistic competition;
speed-up and the annihilation of space through time;
physical infrastructures for production and consumption;
the production of regionality; the production of scale;
territorial systems of political administration; and
geopolitics of capitalism
He has also incorporated three more steps in order to understand the politics of social
struggles between classes and class factions while theorizing uneven geographical
development. These are social movements and accumulation by dispossession; conflicts
around the expanded reproduction of capital; and conflicts over the material embedding of
social processes in the web of life. Harvey believes that if capitalism survives through
uneven geographical development and if it essentially denotes an uneven geographical
development, then, one has to search for an alternative theoretical framework to encompass
this fact.
Harvey has two main innovations that enhance the realistic motion of capitalism. The first is
to deepen the space-time relationship and geography into the analysis, at/near the start of
discourse. Harvey and others have of course transformed economic geography into a realistic

science of MPE (see e.g. the journal Antipode). Deepening the role of space and time
generates more complex motion than some other versions of MPE. Production can thus
spread to new areas, while circulation can be both enhanced and limited by this new spatial
dimension. Linking space with time provides a complex theory of capitals motion, thus
making more realistic capitalisms reproduction process. The role of transportation,
communications, and the world market, including commodity chains, production networks,
and new organizational arrangements, are core components of this space-time uneven
dynamic.

Submitted By:
Neha Bajaj