SEZ acquisitions

By B G Verghese

SEZ’s promote growth and the need for more land for farmers is specious
as arable land is limited.

There is a furious debate raging across India. The headlines talk of and
variously juxtapose SEZ, land, infrastructure, farming, modernisation,
food security, dams, compensation, rural-urban, public-private, “jobs”
vs “employment” (a distinction little understood), rural vs urban,
agriculture vs industry, labour vs capital, mother tongue vs English.
Translated, the dialogue is essentially about tradition vs modernity,
the past vs the future. What the debate is not about, as mistakenly
projected, is “us” vs “them”. We are all in this together. And again,
posing the question as this vs that is to proclaim a false dichotomy.
The choice is not this or that but this and that, in somewhat different
proportions.

The debate has been triggered by a deficit in infrastructure that has
clearly retarded growth, income and employment generation, India’s
global competitiveness and poverty alleviation.

At the same time it has exposed revivalism, social divisions and many
inequalities. Many tend to hug our shameful poverty in the strange
belief that it exemplifies simplicity and virtue. At another level,
people are afraid of change. Every established status quo gathers around
it, a body of vested interests that fears anything different. This is
what the Luddites believed at the commencement of the industrial
revolution in England.

Neo-Ludditism confronts India today. We must of course also heed
Goldsmith’s lament: “Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey; where
wealth accumulates and men decay”. The human and social decay we have
permitted over the years must be corrected.

But the prospects are grim if we wilfully disregard this other truth,
that India will be undermined and its prospects dimmed if it does not
accumulate wealth to sustain its burgeoning numbers. We must promote
equitable growth or let men decay.

The argument that more and more farmers need the land that SEZ’s divert
to feed more Indians is specious. The stock of arable land is limited
and increased farm production must increasingly come from greater
productivity per unit of land and water. This would increase the labour
intensity of agriculture and generate more employment while further
investments create more gainful jobs in the manufacturing and service
sectors. Indian agriculture can do with fewer farmers on uneconomic land
holdings, and dams are necessary as one element in water conservation
and the provision of irrigation, water supply and sanitation.

Likewise, the infrastructure deficit must be made up and maintained in
good order. To this end, special economic zones are being promoted to
develop the necessary infrastructure and foster industrialisation,
exports and concomitant urbanisation and services. Some 181 SEZs have
been approved thus far by the Commerce Ministry and the Prime Minister
has forecast an investment of the order of Rs 14,50,000 crores by 2012
on this programme.

A regulatory framework is planned to ensure equity, appropriate
compensation and resettlement of those displaced. R&R must move away
from the futility of “land for land” to re-housing and stakeholder
participation for those displaced, with training for new employment
opportunities created by or around the new facilities or industries
being created. To say that this has not been done or well done in the
past is no cause for despair or to perpetuate an unsustainable,
subsidised status quo, but to ensure that a suitable and just
rehabilitation package is implemented on the ground.

It has been rightly urged that good arable land, especially if
irrigated, should not be acquired unless absolutely necessary and that
excessive land acquisition for an SEZ or other “public purpose” should
not mask land grab or profiteering in real estate.

Some part of the appreciation in land values with development should be
given back to those from whom it was acquired in the first instance.
Innovative ideas have been mooted to achieve this objective within an
enlarged concept of corporate social responsibility. Meanwhile, to decry
industry, urbanisation or private enterprise as pandemics and see the
Tatas, POSCO or Reliance necessarily as vectors of some dread disease is
to betray a fevered imagination.

SEZs cannot be a panacea for all the country’s ills. But they represent
a new strategy that has worked well elsewhere to stimulate growth, not
at the cost of farming or the poor but as part of an integrated
programme in which human resource development and poverty alleviation
remain core values. Projected rural hubs and retail trading with
linkages to rural supply and national marketing chains must be harnessed
for garibi hatao.

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/oct112006/editpage16145020061010.asp