The Orissa problem
If you have not been up to date with orissa and Jarkhand, time for you start monitoring. These are resource rich states attracting interests from companies everywhere. From Posco, BHP billiton, Mittal to Tatas these two states are on everyone’s radar. Following is an excerpt from Business Standard editorial. With Maoists activity increasing in these two states, alarm bells should be ringing at central Govt. No wonder Sonia is visiting Orrisa ASAP.
It is obvious that the Orissa government is to be blamed for the death of 12 tribals last week, following police firing at agitators who were refusing to vacate land required for setting up of steel mills. Surely, it is time the police in all states got equipped and trained to deal with such situations in a non-lethal manner (water cannons and rubber bullets are known solutions). The bigger fault of the government is that while it acquired 12,000 acres of land between 1992 and 1994 (at presumably the then prevailing market prices), it used only 5,000 acres for two steel mills and allowed tribals who had sold the land to remain in situ, or to return as encroachers. A decade later, when the government took land that it had bought for Rs 37,000 an acre and sold it to Tata Steel at Rs 350,000 an acre, protests were inevitable when evictions began.
State governments need to work out policies designed to deal with dislocation and the downstream resettlement requirements. In the days when large tracts of land were acquired primarily for public sector projects, one commonly used option was to offer a job for one member of each family that gave up its land, but this is not a solution that can be forced on private sector investors. The problem gets compounded when it is known that farmers whose land is acquired do not know how to deal with the cash they get and often use it unwisely, so that they are soon left with neither land nor cash.
Systemic solution, ironically, is to increase the pace of industrial growth so that more jobs get created for anyone who considers moving from the primary to the tertiary sector. Such absorption of the peasantry has been one of the essential elements of the industrialisation process over three centuries, but has not happened to any significant degree in India because industrialisation itself has been slow and halting. Apart from the fact that it is not a democracy, one of the reasons why China has been able to get so many millions of people off the land in recent decades is that industrial growth has made such movement lucrative as well.
If you have not been up to date with orissa and Jarkhand, time for you start monitoring. These are resource rich states attracting interests from companies everywhere. From Posco, BHP billiton, Mittal to Tatas these two states are on everyone’s radar. Following is an excerpt from Business Standard editorial. With Maoists activity increasing in these two states, alarm bells should be ringing at central Govt. No wonder Sonia is visiting Orrisa ASAP.
It is obvious that the Orissa government is to be blamed for the death of 12 tribals last week, following police firing at agitators who were refusing to vacate land required for setting up of steel mills. Surely, it is time the police in all states got equipped and trained to deal with such situations in a non-lethal manner (water cannons and rubber bullets are known solutions). The bigger fault of the government is that while it acquired 12,000 acres of land between 1992 and 1994 (at presumably the then prevailing market prices), it used only 5,000 acres for two steel mills and allowed tribals who had sold the land to remain in situ, or to return as encroachers. A decade later, when the government took land that it had bought for Rs 37,000 an acre and sold it to Tata Steel at Rs 350,000 an acre, protests were inevitable when evictions began.
State governments need to work out policies designed to deal with dislocation and the downstream resettlement requirements. In the days when large tracts of land were acquired primarily for public sector projects, one commonly used option was to offer a job for one member of each family that gave up its land, but this is not a solution that can be forced on private sector investors. The problem gets compounded when it is known that farmers whose land is acquired do not know how to deal with the cash they get and often use it unwisely, so that they are soon left with neither land nor cash.
Systemic solution, ironically, is to increase the pace of industrial growth so that more jobs get created for anyone who considers moving from the primary to the tertiary sector. Such absorption of the peasantry has been one of the essential elements of the industrialisation process over three centuries, but has not happened to any significant degree in India because industrialisation itself has been slow and halting. Apart from the fact that it is not a democracy, one of the reasons why China has been able to get so many millions of people off the land in recent decades is that industrial growth has made such movement lucrative as well.
posted by aruna at
11:14 PM
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