Condemn the Black Ordinance amending the Land Act of 2013, brought by the Modi Government and needs the widest mobilizations of the kisans and rural poor to force its reversal. The Modi Government has shown its contempt for Parliament and democratic norms by adopting the ordinance route in its eagerness to satiate the demands of corporates and FDI.
The ordinance is both authoritarian in its method and utterly anti farmer and anti rural poor in its substance.
The Ordinance brings in a new chapter 3A into the Principal Act of 2013 . This addition expands the definition of public purpose by including five new sectors almost every project from irrigation to power and through another amendment to private hospitals and private educational institutions from the necessity of getting consent from farmers whose land is being acquired. It does not differentiate between Government and public sector projects from those in the private sector. Thus in effect it is even worse than the 1894 Act .
The Ordinance also exempts all these projects from the necessity of a social impact assessment (SIA). SIA is an important process for an impartial assessment of how much land is actually required for a project, how many families are going to be affected, whether or not there is any alternative less displacing land available and so on. It is known that corporate take over much more land than the actual project requires and also fudge figures of those affected. The Ordinance also removes any limit on the time that the land can be held by the company which has acquired it if it has not set up the project. The 2013 Act had kept 5 years as the limit after which the land would have to be returned.
The Ordinance permits easy acquisition of multi-crop land by excluding a large number of projects from the entire Chapter 3 of the Act of 2013 which deals with this subject. This will undoubtedly bring not only distress to farmers who enjoy a good income when land is well irrigated and supports multi-crops but will also have a negative impact on food security.
The Ordinance is thus totally against the interest of farmers. The knowledgeable people had been critical of the earlier Act of 2013 for being inadequate in its protection of farmers and other project affected sections. But this ordinance eliminates even the protections which were included in the Act after the struggle of farmers, their democratic organizations and the Left parties.
People in India have already started the struggle and campaign against this Black ordinance. The clarion call of the hour is : a broad based united struggle of all the political forces and mass organizations opposed to this onslaught on farmers’ rights.
