Why Narendra Modi’s budget looks strangely familiar

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The Narendra Modi led government in India presented its third budget today. The budget was presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley, in a nearly 100 minute long speech.

Before the budget was presented the fear was that the Narendra Modi government is gradually going back to the Congress party’s way of doing things, at least on the economic front. The Congress party has governed India in every decade after independence.

So what is the verdict after the budget? Modi seems to have titled the farm way. As the finance minister Jaitley said during the course of his speech: “We need to think beyond ‘food security’ and give back to our farmers a sense of ‘income security’. Government will, therefore, reorient its interventions in the farm and non-farm sectors to double the income of the farmers by 2022.”

This isn’t surprising given that agricultural growth has been very low at the rate of 0.5% per year, over the last two years, due to bad monsoons. Further, the agricultural growth is expected to be at 1.2% this year, much lower than the overall growth of 7.6%.

Initiatives allowing farmers a better access to the market have been planned. Plans have also been made around judicious use of fertilizers, to increase crop yields across land which does not have access to irrigation and so on.

The government has also planned to offer incentives around the production of pulses. In the recent past, price of the tur dal (pigeon pea) has touched Rs 200 per kg and given that India needs to produce more pulses.

But that was the good bit.

Before the Modi led Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) with Manmohan Singh as prime minster, was in power for a decade.

Singh’s term as prime minster, especially the second term, was marked by an increasing amount of doles as well as corruption. Loans to farmers were written off. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employee Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was passed and so was the Food Security Act. In July 2014, Modi had slammed the UPA government’s food security scheme by saying: “The government in Delhi thinks that just by bringing in the Food Security Bill there will be food on your plate.”

Modi has also mocked the other big Congress scheme, the MGNREGA in the past. In February 2015, Modi had said: “I will ensure MGNREGA is never discontinued. It is proof of your failings. After so many years of being in power, all you were able to deliver is for a poor man to dig ditches a few days a month.”

The Modi government has done a u-turn on this front and allocated Rs 38,500 crore to the scheme for 2016-2017. This is the highest ever allocation to the scheme, the finance minister Jaitley proudly claimed during the course of his speech. Modi is now looking more and more similar to Manmohan Singh. He is a better marketer though than Singh and his regime isn’t corrupt. Not until now, at least.

MGNREGA aims at providing at least 100 days of guaranteed employment in a financial year to every household whose adults are willing to do unskilled manual work. The trouble is that MGNREGA essentially became another scheme where money is simply given away without any substantial assets being created.

Modi in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections had promised minimum government and maximum governance. But with the allocations to MGNREGA being at its highest ever level, looks like that promise has gone out of the window, at least for now.

The economist Surjeet Bhalla has called MGNREGA as the fourth most corrupt institution in the world after FIFA, the BCCI (the board that governs cricket in India) and the public distribution system used by the Indian government to distribute food grains as well as kerosene to the poor.

The food security scheme provides rice and wheat at Rs 3 and Rs 2 per kg to the poor. The Economic Survey of the government presented on February 26, points out that nearly 54% of the wheat, 48% of the sugar and 15% of rice, meant to be distributed through PDS is lost as a leakage.

The price at which the government sells the food grains and the price at which it buys is essentially the food subsidy that it provides. The allocation to food subsidy is at Rs 1,34,835 crore for 2016-2017. This has come down a little from the Rs 1,39,419 crore that was allocated last year.

Nevertheless, no effort has been made to tackle this leakage which costs the country a lot of money. The Report of the High Level Committee on Reinventing the Role and Restructuring of Food Corporation of India presented a report in January 2015 to tackle this issue. It has since been gathering dust.

Further, what India needs is the creation of huge number of jobs. The organised sector in this country continues to remain very small. In 1991-1992, the total number of people working in the organised sector had stood at around 27 million. Since then the number has jumped to around 29.6 million (as of 2011-12, the latest data available).

At the same time nearly 58% of India’s population continues to be dependent on agriculture which generates around 16-18% of India’s gross domestic product. What this tells us is that there is huge overemployment in the sector and jobs need to be created in other sector so that people can move away from agriculture. And that is clearly not happening.

Modi’s win in 2014 tapped into the aspiring class of India and promised to create jobs. In fact, in November 2013, Modi had said: “If BJP comes to power, it will provide one crore jobs which the UPA Government could not do despite announcing it before the last Lok Sabha polls.”

The government is betting on the creation of road and railway infrastructure for the creation semi-skilled and unskilled jobs required for moving people away from agriculture. The finance minister has allocated Rs 97,000 crore towards the road sector. Together with the capital expenditure of the Railways, this amounts to a good Rs 2,18,000 crore during the course of the year.

The question is will this be enough to move people away from agriculture by creating a substantial number of jobs? There are no easy answers for that.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

A slightly different version of the column appeared on BBC.com on February 29, 2016

Why has Narendra Modi changed his Mann Ki Baat on land acquisition


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In a column I had written for Firstpost on February 27, 2015, I had suggested that the prime minister Narendra Modi should use the platform of mann ki baat on All India Radio to explain to the people of this country why the Land Acquisition Act of 2013, needed changes.

Modi addressed the issue in the mann ki baat programme on March 22, 2015. He explained why the The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Ordinance, 2014, which made changes to the Land Acquisition Act of 2013, was needed.

The Article 123 of the Constitution empowers the President to promulgate an ordinance if the Parliament is not in session, provided he is convinced that the situation demands so. Further, an ordinance is valid upto six weeks from the date on which the next session of the Parliament starts. After that it lapses. There is no upper limit to the number of times an ordinance can re-promulgated. The land acquisition ordinance issued by the Modi government has been re-promulgated thrice. It is valid up until today (i.e. August 31, 2015), when it will be allowed to lapse.

Modi made this announcement over the mann ki baat programme aired yesterday. As he said: “Tomorrow [August 31, 2015] the Land Bill will lapse and I have agreed to it. The government will not repromulgate [an] ordinance, but will include 13 points to reform the land acquisition law to benefit farmers.”
There has been much criticism of the Modi government, from those on the left, as well as those on the right. The jhollawallahs feel that the Modi government is kow-towing to the corporate crowd, which finances the Bhartiya Janata Party (not that it does not finance the Congress and other parties). Those on the right believe that it is not the job of the government to be acquiring land.

The issue is a little more complicated than that.  Land is not just needed by the private parties, it is also needed by the government for projects which are of national importance and which seek to improve the quality of life of the people of this country.

In a recent interview to The Indian Express, Mangu Singh, Managing Director of the Delhi Metro was asked how does the Delhi Metro manage land acquisition: “Fortunately, so far there hasn’t been any case where we require private land under the new Act (Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013), because we also believe it is almost impossible to acquire land under the new Act.”

In fact, this is something that even Jairam Ramesh, the brain behind the 2013 Land Acquisition Act also admits to. As he writes in Legislating for Justice—The Making of the 2013 Land Acquisition Law along with Muhammad Ali Khan: “The law was drafted with the intention to discourage land acquisition. It was drafted so that land acquisition would become a route of last resort.” In fact, for anyone who really wants to understand how complicated the process of land acquisition actually is under the 2013 Act, should read Ramesh and Khan’s book. It is not surprising that Singh of Delhi Metro believes that it is impossible to acquire land under the new Act. And he doesn’t work for a greedy corporate.

For a country which has nearly 13 million people entering the workforce every year and which has aspirations of “making things,” a law which discourages acquisition of land really cannot be the best way to move forward. No country has gone from being developing to being developed without the expansion and success of its manufacturing sector. And any manufacturing enterprise needs some land.

Further, the physical infrastructure in the country from roads to rail to ports are all creaking. Nearly 70 years after independence many villages in the country do not have access to electricity. All this needs land.

Another fundamental point that the jhollawallahs need to understand that nearly half of the country’s population is engaged in agriculture producing only around 18% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). While it is one thing romanticising agriculture, there is a fundamental problem here. There are many more people working in agriculture than required. This means that people needed to be moved out of agriculture. The situation gets even worse once you take into account the fact that most people who work on farms don’t totally depend on income from the farm. Only 17 percent of them survive entirely on money from their farm. So most farmers need to make ends meet by doing other odd jobs.

When Modi had addressed the country through the mann ki baat programme in March earlier this year, he had addressed this issue when he had said: ““In every household, the farmer wants only one son to stay in farming. But he wants other children to get out there and work because he knows that in order to run a household in this day and age different endeavours need to be made.” He then went to say that given this scenario what is wrong with the government acquiring land for building an industrial corridor and ensuring that jobs are created in the vicinity of where farmers live.

The point being that Modi had sold the land acquisition ordinance as something that would benefit the farmers. Now five months later, he has withdrawn the ordnance and even sold this move as being beneficial to farmers. How can that be possible?

The question is why has Modi taken a u-turn on the land acquisition issue after expending so much political capital behind it? A simple answer is the up-coming assembly election in Bihar. Other than the fact that Bihar sends 16 members to the Rajya Sabha, the election is also seen as a sort of a vote on Modi’s time in office since May 2014. It is being seen as a vote on whether people still believe in Modi’s promise of “acche din”.

The Bhartiya Janata Party and the National Democratic Alliance do not have the numbers required in the Rajya Sabha to push through key economic legislation. To get members in the Rajya Sabha, the BJP plus NDA first needs to win state assembly elections. The Rajya Sabha members are elected by the members of state assemblies.

The trouble is this focus on state assembly elections will continue for the next couple of years with elections in key states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh coming up over the next few years. Hence, compromises on the economic reform front will keep happening.

Chances are the BJP plus NDA might win some of the assembly elections and end up with the numbers they require in the Rajya Sabha. But by then will there be enough time left for the Modi government to deliver even a small part of the “acche din” they had sold to the people of this country? For that to happen, the government needs to create conditions which lead to the creation of jobs. That isn’t happening at this point of time.

The three key economic reforms it was believed Modi would push through were: land reforms, labour reforms and the goods and services tax. Land reforms have been put on the back burner. Labour reforms never really took off (there have been some minor moves in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, two states which barely have any industry). And so many compromises have been made in the bid to get it passed, that it is better that the Goods and Services Tax does not get passed in its current shape.

If they continue going the way they currently are, Modi and BJP might end up with a majority in the Rajya Sabha, only to lose to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.  And that is something the country cannot afford. Because then the BJP will behave like the Congress is now.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on August 31, 2015

Management lessons we can learn from Rahul Gandhi, but he won’t

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Vivek Kaul

Rahul Gandhi, the vice president of the Congress party, is on an extended vacation. This at a point of time when the first half of the budget session was under progress.
The Narendra Modi government has been trying to push a lot of new legislation through the Parliament in the recent past. And the fact that it doesn’t have enough MPs in the Rajya Sabha, it has had problems pushing through legislation. The opposition parties have ganged up together and managed to hold up the land acquisition ordinance, for one.
The point is that Rahul should have been in New Delhi during this time and been leading the opposition against the government. Instead, he is out on a holiday.
The bigger worry for Rahul should be that if he wants to keep his family owned Congress party relevant, he needs to reinvent both himself and his party. A good way to look at the Congress party is as an organization which is failing.
As Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Haste ask in Wiser—Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter: “Suppose that you are a leader of an organization and that is not doing well, perhaps because it is stuck in old ways of thinking…What can you do?”
After asking this question the authors offer the example of Intel: “Intel Corporation, a large American corporation, faced exactly this problem in the 1980s. After fourteen years of profits it was losing a lot of business in the memory chip market, which it had pioneered. In a dramatic move, the company decided to abandon the entire market,” write the authors.
Why did Intel make this decision? Andrew Grove, who at that point of time was the President of Intel and would later become its CEO as well as Chairman recounts in his book Only the Paranoid Survive: “I remember a time in the middle of 1985, after this aimless wandering had been going on for almost a year. I was in my office with Intel’s chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore, and we were discussing our quandary. Our mood was downbeat. I looked out [of] the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned to back to Gordon and I asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him, numb, then said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?””
This a very simple story which has a huge lesson. Organizations which are stuck in the old way of doing things need to get rid of their memories. “For Intel, it initiated a spectacularly successful strategy. The story suggests that when a group is aimlessly wandering or on a path that does not seem so good, it is an excellent idea to ask, “If we brought in new leadership, what would it do? Asking that simple question can break through a host of conceptual traps,” write Sunstein and Haste.
This is something that Rahul and the top leadership of the Congress party need to ask themselves. The party’s core idea of socialism and garibi hatao has been rejected by the voters, for the simple reason that it has been espousing the idea for more than four decades now. And even after four decades the ordinary Indian continues to be poor. So clearly what this tells him is that the Congress party was never serious about eradicating poverty. If it was it would have managed to eradicate poverty by now, given that the party has been in power in each of the decades since independence.
Hence, the party needs a new idea. And that will only come if one of the Gandhis comes up with something given that the party revolves around them. At this point of time this Gandhi has to be Rahul.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem likely that Rahul will do anything, if his lackadaisical leadership until now is anything to go by. Gurcharan Das makes a very interesting point in India Unbound about family owned businesses. As he writes: “Pulin Garg, the thoughtful professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad…used to say, “Haweli ki umar saath saal[The life of a family owned business is sixty years.””
The Congress party in its current form was formed when Rahul’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi, split from the original Congress party in 1969. Since then the party became a family run organization and has constantly been run by the Gandhis except for a brief interlude in the 1990s, when Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul’s father, was assassinated and his mother Sonia did not want to enter politics.
Given this, the party since 1969, or for a period of close to 46 years has been a family run organization, and its approaching the 60 year cut off for survival.
Rahul is the third generation of the Gandhi family running the party. And normally family owned businesses shut-down in the third generation. As Das writes: “Thomas Mann expressed…in Buddenbrooks, arguably the finest book ever written about family business. It describes the saga of three generations: in the first generation the scruffy and astute patriarch works hard and makes money. Born into money, the second generation does not want more money. It wants power…Born into money and power, the third generation dedicates itself to art. So the aesthetic but physically weak grandson plays music. There is no one to look after the business and it is the end of the…family.”
Let’s look at the above paragraph in the context of the Congress party. Indira Gandhi built the party in its current form. Rajiv enjoyed the power in the aftermath of her assassination. Sonia entered politics because the Gandhi family was used to power by then. And now Rahul, the weak grandson, is busy driving it into the ground.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)  

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Mar 24, 2015

Modi’s mann ki baat on land acquisition is the first attempt to explain reform in 25 years

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In a column I wrote on February 27, 2015
, I had said that prime minister Narendra Modi should talk to the people of this country directly through his mann ki baat programme on All India Radio. Modi spoke to the people of India directly yesterday on mann ki baat and addressed the contentious issue of land acquisition.
Among other things he criticized the Congress party which has been protesting against The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Ordinance, 2014.
Modi said that “those projecting themselves as sympathisers of farmers and undertaking protests,” had been using the Land Acquisition Act 1894, a 120 year-old law for 60-65 years after independence. In the process he exposed the hypocrisy of the Congress party, which has been in power in every decade after independence, and had the opportunity to set things right on the land acquisition front. But it never went around to doing this.
The Land Acquisition Act 1894, had been the law of the land until 2013. This Act gave unparalleled powers to the government to acquire land. A 1985 version of this Act stated: “Whenever it appears to the [appropriate Government] the land in any locality [is needed or] is likely to be needed for any public purpose [or for a company], a notification to that effect shall be published in the Official Gazette [and in two daily newspapers circulating in that locality of which at least one shall be in the regional language], and the Collector shall cause public notice of the substance of such notification to be given at convenient places in the said locality.”
This was not surprising given that the law came into being when the British ruled India. This allowed governments all over India to acquire land from the public. Many governments passed on this land to corporates, and in the process both the government and the corporates made money. The only one who did not make money was the individual whose land was being acquired. Of course, this did not go unnoticed. People saw politicians and corporates making a killing in the process. And the trust that is required for any system to work completely broke down. In 2013, the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) brought in The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013.
One of the major provisions of the Act was that private companies acquiring land would require the prior consent of at least eighty percent of the affected families. In case of public-private partnerships(PPP) the prior consent was required from at least seventy percent of the affected families.
The ordinance brought in the Modi government is essentially the same as the 2013 Act, except for a few changes. The ordinance does away with the requirement of prior consent for land being acquired for affordable housing, defence, defence production, rural infrastructure including electrification, industrial corridors etc. There is nothing wrong with this change.
Also, the 2013 Act stipulated that the land acquisition carried out under 13 Acts of Parliament which dealt with land acquired for the purpose of atomic energy, highways, national highways, mining, railways, metro etc., were exempted from the Act. The 2014 ordinance did away with this distinction, which meant that land being acquired under these Acts will also be compensated at the same rate as promised in the 2013 Act. Doing away with this distinction is a step in the right direction.
Prime minister Modi in his address pointed out that maximum land is acquired under these 13 acts. “If we hadn’t approved this amendment, then the farmer would have continued losing land to projects with low compensation,” he said. He also put a rhetorical question to the people of this country: “Tell me if what we did was wrong?…Can someone tell me if this improvement goes against farmers?”
As per the 2013 Act, for rural areas the minimum compensation promised is anywhere between two to four times the market value of land along with the value of the assets on that land. For urban areas the minimum compensation promised is two times the market value of land along with the value of the assets on that land. So, land acquired under the 13 Acts of Parliament will also be compensated at the same rate as the land acquired for other projects.
Modi in his address clarified that the “ordinance does not change the compensation legislated in the 2013 Act one bit.” He also addressed the genuine concern of people that more than the land that is required for a project is typically taken on. He assured them that in the days to come there would be a proper assessment of how much land will be required for a project and this will ensure that excess land is not acquired.
Indian corporates over the years have acquired land through the government and become lazy in the process. Also, many of them started to see themselves as landlords and wanted land just for the heck of it. This can be said from the inefficient use of industrial land in India. If Modi follows what he has said that will be another step in the right direction. It will also do a lot to rebuilt the trust required for the process of land acquisition to work efficiently.
Agriculture, forestry and fishing form around 18% of the total economic output of the country. Data from the India Brand Equity Foundation, a trust established by the ministry of commerce and industry, points out that agriculture “employs just a little less than 50 per cent of the country’s workforce”.
If nearly 50% of country’s workforce is engaged in an activity which produces only 18% of its economic output, there is something that is not quite right about the entire scenario. What this clearly tells us is that too many Indians are dependent on agriculture and this number needs to come down. The situation gets even worse once you take into account the fact that most people who work on farms don’t totally depend on income from the farm. Only 17 percent of them survive entirely on money from their farm.
Modi addressed this issue as well by saying: “In every household, the farmer wants only one son to stay in farming. But he wants other children to get out there and work because he knows that in order to run a household in this day and age different endeavours need to be made.” He then went to say that given this scenario what is wrong with the government acquiring land for building an industrial corridor and ensuring that jobs are created in the vicinity of where farmers live. This was another important issue that Modi addressed in the programme.
To conclude, economic reforms in this country have also been carried out through stealth. No government in this country has ever made an effort to explain economic reform to people. This was the first time since the process of economic reform started in 1991, when someone has made an effort to explain it in simple layman terms to the people of this country. In fact, what Modi has started needs to continue. Other leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party now need to take this forward by talking to the people of this country directly.

The column originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on Mar 23, 2015

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Sonia Gandhi, Congress protesting against land acquisition law is sheer hypocrisy

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Vivek Kaul

Sonia Gandhi, the soon to be replaced president of the Congress party if media reports are to be believed, is leading the charge against the land acquisition bill. And this is very ironical given that it was the Congress party which created the land acquisition mess in the first place.
Until 2013, land acquisition in India was governed by the Land Acquisition Act 1894. This Act came into being during the period of British rule in India and survived for nearly 120 years.
A 1985 version of this Act stated: “Whenever it appears to the [appropriate Government] the land in any locality [is needed or] is likely to be needed for any public purpose [or for a company], a notification to that effect shall be published in the Official Gazette [and in two daily newspapers circulating in that locality of which at least one shall be in the regional language], and the Collector shall cause public notice of the substance of such notification to be given at convenient places in the said locality.”
Given the fact that the Act was a remnant of the British era, it gave enormous powers to the government to seize almost any land that it wanted to. The British were the rulers of India, and not a democratically elected government. They could do what they wanted to.
The surprising bit was that the Land Acquisition Act 1894 managed to survive through 66 years of independence as well. It was abused by almost all governments over the years. The governments seized land from people and handed them over to corporates who made a killing. It would be safe to say that many politicians also benefited in the process.
The humble farmer whose land was being seized saw this happen. The land that was acquired from him at a pittance(if at all anything was paid) by the government was handed over to private parties and everyone except the farmer benefited in the process.
Hence, the trust that is required for any system to work completely broke down. And this will not be easy to repair. Unless this trust is rebuilt land acquisition for business purposes will not be easy at all. The farmer or individuals whose land is being acquired need to start to feel that they are not being taken for a ride.
Further, given that governments acquired land for them, Indian corporates have become lazy over the years. Also, many of them started to see themselves as landlords and wanted land just for the heck of it. This can be said from the inefficient use of industrial land in India.
Let me first share something from personal experience. I grew up in Ranchi, which had many public sector enterprises. The biggest of them all was the Heavy Engineering Corporation (HEC). It was built on land acquired from farmers. But only a small portion of the total amount of land that was acquired was ever put to use. Large portions of land at HEC were simply lying unused.
Professor R Krishna Kumar makes a similar point in a recent column in The Hindu Business Line in a more precise way: “
Japan uses a mere 1.9 million hectares for residential and industrial use. This is only 5 per cent of their land; forest cover in Japan is a whopping 67 per cent. Compare this with the 22 million ha of Indian non-agricultural land. That is, Japan uses less than 10 per cent of the non-agricultural land available in India to produce three times more industrial output! The inefficiency of Indian industry in land-use is glaring.”
Hence, those corporates who have acquired land over the years haven’t put it to efficient use, given that they haven’t paid for it or got it an extremely concessional rate. One look at the five-star campuses of Indian IT companies should make this clear as well.
The Congress party was in power for most of these 66 years with only brief interludes where other coalitions came to power in Delhi. And it chose not to do anything about the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, for nearly six decades, even though it was in power in every decade after independence. In 2013, the party put forward The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013, which went to the other extreme and brought all land acquisition to a standstill.
Hence, the party protesting against the
The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Ordinance, 2014, which is nothing but the Congress 2013 Act with a few amendments, is nothing but sheer hypocrisy. After taking the people of this country for ride on more than six decades, the party suddenly seems to have discovered its humane side.
To conclude, for the land acquisition system to start working again the trust that has been lost needs to be rebuilt. For this to happen the government needs to proceed very carefully. As Namita Wahi writes in a column in The Indian Express: “Acquisition of land by the state for private industry must only be done upon the showing of a demonstrable public purpose in each case.” And that is very important.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Mar 18, 2015