The Baseless Development

Why Land Acquisition Really Matters? And What Could Be Done About It?

Don't Take My Land

India is growing at over 8% annually. To fuel this growth consistent supply of huge amount of resources are required. Whether it's fuel, minerals or land, everything is required at a scale that has never been experienced before. But there's a common problem that is holding all these from being input to the development cycle and that is land. The huge population has made the world's 7^th largest country a 'People Surplus, Land Deficit Country'. Adding to the problem is years of inefficient handling of land.

Since early 2000's, India's frantic pace of growth has ensured that the land and their owners are exploited to a huge extent. Earlier unawareness among farmers & their hope to benefit has largely ensured peaceful industrialization. But after years of experience & feeling of being left out they now consider industrialization a monster, which just gobble up their land. They feel that the sole beneficiaries of the whole process are corporates, who in tandem with local government officials acquire much more land than required. A waste of a precious resource that must be stopped, immediately. The proposed 'Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement(LARR) Act, 2011' is a good step in that direction and I am sure that it will induce some discipline among the buyers.

The bill proposes that for every acquisition of more than 100 acres of land, the consent of atleast 80% locals should be taken. Industry fears that this could make 'Land Acquisition' a tough and slow process. But I think once completed, projects can be executed at much faster pace with less probability of people protesting thereafter. Also the compensation clause will increase the cost of projects for sure but it will reduce the tendency of businesses to acquire land in much larger quantum than required and force them to use it efficiently. However there should be one modification in the bill, instead of high one time payment monthly compensation amount should be increased from Rs2000/acre/month. As experienced till now compensation beneficiaries spend lavishly in initial years and due to lack of any skills other than farming, they face a tough question for survival once that compensation finishes. The increased regular compensation will ensure that those displaced are assured of regular income. In addition guaranteed job to a member of each displaced family will make them live a respectful life.

Share It, Don't Capture It

But profit sharing can be tricky and difficult to implement, since locals lack resources to effectively audit the books of mining companies and thus probability of frauds will be high. Also the profits from mining will come slowly after the projects go on-stream. Also compensation in the form of monthly allowance, profit sharing, taxes and one time allowances may render the projects unviable. To solve this, a 'Rehabilitation Authority' should be set up which would be the sole organization responsible for rehabilitation and resettlement of displaced people and will work on non-profit basis. The organization will be responsible for facilitating all the acquisition in future from its own corpus, which will be funded by profit sharing and one time compensation from corporates who acquire land.

There are more such problems with the proposed bill, which has to be looked into. However it's clear that whatever government do, it has to do it fast and has to do it right, it can't experiment on that count or else India would risk losing it's competitive and demographic edge.

Break This Evening

Open Letter To A Madrasi Girl

Since the last few days, a blogpost by a South Indian girl is making news all over the social networks, blogs and even print media. The post on her blog Broken Morning has raged a war of comments on web. The so called 'Madrasi girl' has infact highlighted the issue of regionalism in India. Since lack of sense nationalism and increasing regionalism is one of the major issue that has and will always challenge our growth, I am taking up the matter on this blog. 

*But before starting, i would recommend you to read the blog on which my whole post will be based. It's Broken Morning.The blog has thrown light on some of the problems that the North Indian(NI) society is plagued with, but has done so in an exaggerated and harsh way. Infact, she has so much isolated herself from NI that she mentioned south as a separate country. So, you could take my points as counter views to her's.

Starting with the language 'Miss Madrasan', may be our English is bad but what about your Hindi, after all that's our unofficial national language. Aren't we suppose to speak that fluently? I have not met any Tamil speaking the language as fluently as we do. Regarding intelligence!!!!Of Course, South Indians are genius. After all, who else could mastermind a scandal worth 100k Crs. According to her, we don't like their food and they don't like us. Atleast not liking their food is not inhumane. So in that sense we are better humans than them. They are not into food like us, but what's the purpose of cracking the IIT, if their electoral choices are still based upon freebies like TV and JMG's. If they are so much educated then why the state has more BPL card holders than the population? Any one there to explain me? And who said they aren't beautiful, with their hair fresh out of dish washer and 'to die for' moustache they always look gorgeous. But here's a problem with us, we were brought up on Gurudas Mann and not Rajanikanth. After all, no one challenge his out of world powers. If she thinks that naming every thing on boy's name is wrong, than isn't it true vice-a-versa. If here in North India women cows down to man's demand we could say men there kneel down to woman’s demand!!!!

The debate could go on indefinitely. But the fact is that every person, every society and every nation have some strengths and weakness. No society is perfect and we have to adapt to their ways and instead of criticizing it, should work in tandem to resolve those issues and aspire to create a perfect society. This specially matters for India, as we have to come out from within the small circles of regionalism and be nationalistic for our country to be a prominent force tomorrow.

And apologies if anyone's hurt!! And yes these are my personal views and is not on behalf of North India. 

That's also a North Indian quality.......






Read:  HT City, Broken Morning

Investment Worth Investing

Forgetting Everything Else, Prioritize Investments in Education!!! Why? 

What's better, giving subsidies or empowering citizens to buy goods on their own? With no doubt, latter should be the answer. But the bigger question is how? How could it be done?

There are three ways for a person to be rich (or atleast not a poor):

1. Inheriting ancestral wealth.
2. By luck including hitting a jackpot in financial market or a lottery.
3. And the last one is Education.

The first two can't be controlled. But Education could be!!! Any government which strives for socio-economic development of a country, should make investments on education its top priority. They should understand that 'an uneducated rich could fall into the trap of poverty but an educated person can never be poor'.

Make Education Worth It

Now, coming to India, in this globalized world only quantity and quality of human resource is going to determine our competence. It's pity that India, despite being home to world's first university, Nalanda, is today facing the shortage of qualified professionals to fuel its economic growth. It's not that there's dearth of colleges or students who want quality education, the country today has more than half a million students studying in more that 12000 colleges and polytechnics. But forget the numbers and the picture will be clearer. Lack of funds and good faculties has led these colleges to provide an education which the industry thinks is obsolete. It's illogical to provide an education which has no use for our own industry. We aspire to be the educational hub of the world by 2020, but if our institutes are finding it difficult to match up to the Indian standards than how would they manage to keep up with much more tech-savvy and financially huge firms.

Indians spend $4bn annually for higher education abroad. Citing this, many experts are lobbying for allowing profit making educational institutions(read foreign institutes) to setup their campuses here. But will this end all the problems. I am sceptical about it. The cost of education in these institutes, will make it a privilege for few. So what could be the solution? Government Investments. Only government investments in education could solve the problem. Public support for education is essential to ensure balance between educational and social missions. It's essential that funding sources should be diversified, but excessive commercialization should be forbidden. As of now, GOI spends merely 3% of the GDP on education (nearly 0.8-1.2% on higher education) and should increase it to atleast 7-8% of GDP to ensure our competence globally. But where will the money come from. Instead of directly subsidizing students, government should make outgoing students pay for incoming students. This way, burden will not be on student's parents but on earning professionals. In addition, Industrial bodies should be asked to provide certain portion of their profits to these institutes as part of CSR.

However, cost is only a small part of the problem, there are many others and availability of good teachers is one of them. More and more students should be encouraged to take up teaching as a profession and should be provided some 10% additional teaching incentive than their industrial counter parts. Also, high ranking officials should be encouraged to be visiting faculties to institutes. Additionally, before designing syllabus AICTE should consult industrial representatives to know their exact requirements. All these steps would take time to show results and in the mean time top tier institutes should be asked to share classroom lectures online to enable students from other institutes to access the best resources.

One thing is for sure, if India could improve education then 21st century will be India's and if it can't, we will lose an opportunity of millennium.