The Union Cabinet met for over an hour-and-a-half to clear the land acquisition and rehabilitation bill on Monday. The bill for the first time seeks to identify public and private purpose for land acquisition.
New Delhi: The highly contentious Land Acquisition Bill was discussed at length on Monday with the Union Cabinet meeting and giving it a formal nod. It is likely to be tabled in Parliament on Wednesday. With land disputes turning violent, the government finally decided to change the 117-year-old law to acquire land.
If enacted, the law will make consent by 80 per cent of the affected population mandatory for acquisition for private purposes. This provision will not apply to land sought by the state for public purposes like highways, railways hospitals and eduction institutions.
The bill makes its clear that multi-crop irrigated land can be acquired only as a last resort.
It provides for compensation which is four times the prevailing market value in rural areas and double in urban areas.
Even as Cabinet Ministers Sharad Pawar, Veerappa Moily and Vilasrao Deshmukh expressed reservations about the some of the clauses including the emergency clause which allows for emergency land acquisition only for defence and strategic purposes, the government had made up its mind. And the draft bill was cleared.
If enacted, private players will also be asked to bear the burden of rehabilitation for projects requiring more than 50 acres in urban areas and 100 in rural areas, both the seller and the dependents of the land will be covered under this clause.
Perhaps learning from the Noida Extension episode, the bill seeks to prohibit any land acquisition under emergency clause except for defence and strategic purposes
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