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Withhold assent to land acquisition amendment Bill: Kiran Choudhry to President
Congress MLA Kiran Choudhry has asked President to withhold her assent to the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Haryana Amendment) Bill, 2021
Haryana Congress MLA Kiran Choudhry has asked the President to withhold her assent to the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Haryana Amendment) Bill, 2021, in the larger public interest.
The Bill was passed by the state assembly last year and has been sent for the consideration of the President by the Haryana governor.
In a letter to the President, Droupadi Murmu, the former minister said that her letter is a prayer for fair play for farmers, tenants, artisans and labourers whose sole means of subsistence and livelihood is dependent on agricultural land. “While we accept the imperative need to acquire land by the state for infrastructure projects for rapid development, this has to be through a humane, transparent and fair process of adequate compensation, resettlement and rehabilitation of all the affected persons. The Haryana amendment Bill seeks to disturb this tenuous equilibrium enshrined in the benign principal Act passed by the Parliament,” she wrote. Choudhry said the insidious Bill, if allowed to become law, will lead to unconscionable enrichment of big corporate players while impoverishing the peasantry in Haryana, and is thus likely to disturb the social harmony and peace in the state.
“The amendment Bill is ipso-facto unconstitutional and wholly antithetical in letter and spirit to the central principal Act. Provisions 2 and 3 of the Bill seek to exempt multi-cropped irrigated agricultural lands from bar to acquisition, not only for government projects but also for the private sector under the guise of public-private partnership by seeking to insert Section 10A. These provisions have the effect of waiving off the statutory safeguards of either seeking consent of 70% of affected stakeholders (as envisaged under Section 2 of the principal Act), or of doing a social impact assessment of such projects, which is in complete contravention of the basic spirit of the central principal Act. The sole purpose of this proposed amendment seems to be to throw lush and prime agriculture land open to acquisition by big corporate players, waiving the safeguards in the benign principal Act,” the Congress MLA said.
She further said that the Bill is wholly against the principles of natural justice and fair play, as it seeks to arm the collector with the draconian powers of announcing an award for acquisition without a spot visit or an inquiry in case such acquisition is with the consent of persons interested in the land. This can lead to grave injustice to persons whose names are not reflected in the revenue records, female coparceners who are deprived of their due share in the property in a patriarchal society; ‘gair-maurusi’ tenants having non-proprietary rights in land; and persons having customary rights of the easement, co-owners’ right of access to their fields in a Khewat, right to use a water-channel, owners’ right of disposal of wastewater in households, etc. Only a spot visit by a collector could bring home the true picture in all such cases, she said.
