India's Land Theft

India's fast-growing cities are hurting the poor in their drive to speed up land acquisition for new metro train networks, roads and government offices by ditching vital legal safeguards, campaigners say. The rapid expansion of Indian cities has triggered disputes over land, with rights groups reporting violent evictions of poorer communities. India's urban population is forecast to double by 2050, with the area used by towns and cities rising five times by then, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI.) That would require an average of 15 square km (6 square miles) of land, fitted with infrastructure and amenities, to be readied every day up to 2050 - most of which would come from converting rural land to urban use, said WRI's Rejeet Mathews.

Several states have introduced amendments that dilute the federal Land Acquisition Act of 2013, which was designed to protect land owners by ensuring their consensus, paying generous compensation and rehabilitating those displaced. Their alternate acquisition methods often "lack transparency and are regressive", said E.A.S. Sarma, an activist who filed a petition against plans to build a greenfield city the size of Seattle along a river in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

"The amendments to a mostly progressive law have opened the floodgates to forcible acquisition of land," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Tens of millions of farmers till smallholdings in India and protests against land acquisitions are common, with a $17-billion high-speed rail link facing delays due to fruit growers opposed to selling their orchards. The 2013 law can make land acquisition lengthy and expensive, said Mathews, WRI's head of urban development in India, as it offers compensation of up to four times the market value in rural areas and two times in urban areas.

"States' finances are limited, while land values keep rising," said Mathews.

Elsewhere, authorities are embarking on partnerships with private developers, and cluster redevelopment of slums and tenement blocks, including in Mumbai, home to some of the priciest real estate in the world.

http://news.trust.org/item/20181003103552-wde2i/