Not till winter?

For the past year, land issues have been a spark for anger and political confrontation all over the country, and the Supreme Court’s recent intervention in Greater Noida land acquisition has underlined the urgency of discovering a political solution. Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of India said at the beginning of this year that investment would slide unless land issues were sorted out. And, sure enough, FDI numbers have shown an alarming slide while Indian companies, able and willing to invest abroad, are also postponing or cancelling investment in the country till comprehensive, transparent and fair land acquisition mechanisms are in place. Every project that goes abroad, every opportunity foregone, has a cost in terms of growth, jobs and poverty reduction. The delay in getting a new land acquisition bill done has, perhaps more importantly, impacted crucial development work, and the creation of rural and urban infrastructure that has massive spillover effects on growth and investment.

So why is it that the rural development ministry has decided to further postpone the introduction of the Centre’s land acquisition bill? On Thursday, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh announced the ministry would organise month-long “pre-legislative consultations” with various NGOs, states and political parties before it submitted the already prepared draft to the cabinet for approval. The last day of the monsoon session of Parliament is September 8; setting aside a month for consultation means the bill’s introduction will likely miss this session altogether. This is despite the fact that the UPA government, through the statements of several senior ministers, had already committed itself to introducing the bill in the monsoon session. The government cannot afford to be this cavalier with legislation of such importance.

Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, while touring several flashpoints in Uttar Pradesh where land acquisition disputes had broken into open violence, accepted that the Centre had been tardy with essential land legislation. “We will bring a good law, we are trying our best to pass it in the next session of Lok Sabha,” he had said then, blaming the Congress’s coalition partners for the delay. The coalition (read Mamata Banerjee) is no longer the problem; but it is worrying that it appears politics still is. All this while, state governments have been left to their own devices, compensating for the antiquated, colonial-era legislation with their individual packages. To have Parliament go yet another session without even starting the process of bringing legislative clarity to the issue indicates a strange order of priorities.