Abstract
Until recently, land acquisition in India had been undertaken closely following the provisions laid down by the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (i.e. during the time of this study) which was created by the colonial powers to seize private property in consonance with their imperialist motives. This Act has been amended several times by the State Governments. These amendments generally have pertained to the elaboration of compensation issues and have shrewdly retained the ambiguities to make way for corruption. The new land acquisition act has come to force only on 1 January 2014 and it has been referred to as “The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013” (henceforth refereed to as the New Act). Although it marks a step forward in sensitively addressing some of the earlier concerns, it is not without a few loopholes that need to be questioned. This paper discusses the critical elements of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 in comparison to the New Act, and through the case study of land acquisition in a village located in the urban fringe of Delhi, attempts to look into the nuances of the interlinkages between land dispossession and livelihood transformation. Specifically, this paper tries to assess the efficacy of the provisions laid down in the previous act in relation to the village study and attempts to comment upon implications of the livelihood outcomes of the farmers losing land to the state perpetrated land acquisition. This paper is composed of four sections. Section 1 contextualizes the study. Section 2 attempts to critically discuss some of the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act 1894 and 2014 in relation to its implication to the land dispossessed. Section 3 elaborates upon the case study of land dispossession in a fringe village in Delhi with a view to highlight the drawbacks of the Land Acquisition framework in India. Section 4 attempts to conclude the discussion bringing out the concerns persisting in the current law with reference to the case study.
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Notes
- 1.
Public purpose of land acquisition generally refers to land requirements for the defence sector, infrastructure provisioning including government offices, hospitals, educational institutes, land for creating housing for the poor as well as project or natural calamity affected people and the like. In short, it encompasses all those endeavours that promise to extend benefits to the general public. It has been detailed under section 3 f of the 1894 Act and section 2 (1 & 2) of the New Act.
- 2.
Detailed in section 26 of the New Act.
- 3.
The bargadars are entitled to receive 25 % of the compensation amount payable to the land owners according to 1894 Act.
- 4.
According to Ghatak and Ghosh (2011) although these provisions have introduced some amount of flexibility, these have not been secured against corrupt practices. For instance the employment guarantee option does not outline the conditions of job termination and allow the industrialist to sack the farmer who had been employed. Also, the partial payment of compensation in the form of company shares expose the farmers to the risks associated with it to add on to impending agony in relation to his incompetence in managing finance.
- 5.
Although the initial analysis discusses the trends of both principal and subsidiary occupations, the later part of the analysis pertains to the former only to focus on the major trends only.
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Mallik, C., Sen, S. (2017). Land Acquisition Policy and Praxis: The Case of Peri-urban Delhi. In: Acharya, S., Sen, S., Punia, M., Reddy, S. (eds) Marginalization in Globalizing Delhi: Issues of Land, Livelihoods and Health. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3583-5_7
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