The Orissa problem

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. Whatever notions of natural justice may be applied to the case, the hard fact remains that ownership of the land had passed to the government, and it is impossible for any government to pay anyone a second time for the same land because it would get hauled over the coals by auditors. But since politics intersects with economics, the state government has to make a gesture to the now dispossessed tribals. The only feasible option is to use some of the unearned profits on tribal resettlement or rehabilitation-and to take action against those officials who failed to secure and retain vacant possession when the land was first acquired. Such incidents could multiply as several states, like Jharkhand, have been aggressively wooing investors to set up large industrial establishments to exploit their mineral wealth. 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. Nor can there be a land-for-land swap (as demanded by Medha Patkar and others in the context of large dam projects) since, practically speaking, there is probably no equivalent land available in nearby areas in most cases. 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. A 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.