Indian Land Grab Who Suffers?

Throughout history land has been important to human development no matter the scale or how it was used. Land gave people a means for survival as it allowed the nomadic to build permanent settlements as agriculture made it possible for an easily accessible food source. Even in today's headlong rush towards globalization land and access to it by those on lower end of the social economic scale remains important. Yet, the Indian government has been using a Colonial Era Law to force people off their land all in the name of "progress."

The Land Acquisition Act of 1894 gave the government draconian powers to acquire land for the purpose of commercial use often without just compensation awarded to the previous owner. The Act which is still in force today is being used by the Indian government to force farmers off their land.

The World Bank has worked for many years to commodify land. The 1991 World Bank structural adjustment programme reversed land reform, deregulated mining, roads and ports. While the laws of independent India to keep land in the hands of the tiller were reversed, the 1894 Land Acquisition Act was untouched.

The World Bank's original mandate was to help the poor in developing countries achieve a higher economic status today that mandate seems to have changed. Multinational corporations and their continued financial success seems to be its driving force.

The government is behaving as the foreign rulers did when the Act was first enforced in 1894, appropriating land through violence for the profit of corporations - JayPee Infratech in Uttar Pradesh for the Yamuna expressway, South Korea's POSCO in Orissa and AREVA of France in Jaitapur - grabbing land for private profit and not, by any stretch of the imagination, for any public purpose. This is rampant in the country today.

The land grab will help the more affluent as is the norm when profits are involved and the down trodden are in the way. I'm sure these farmers whose land was taken can't what to move into their new luxury townships and attend a Formula One race at the new track which is to built on the land just taken from them.

The government in the worlds so called largest democracy is acting just like any other authoritarian government.