Jairam Ramesh, the UPA government’s Minister of Rural Development, has come up with a draft Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill that will replace the notorious Land Acquisition Act, 1894. The draft bill clearly seeks to legalise and intensify the ongoing corporate land-grab campaign in the country even as it talks about addressing “the concerns of farmers and those whose livelihoods are dependent on the land being acquired”.

Before being brought to the rural development ministry, Jairam Ramesh was in charge of the forest ministry where his greatest role was to give a green signal to the POSCO project in Odisha which seeks to acquire 4,000 acres of land in flagrant violation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006. And now as the Minister of Rural Development he has declared a veritable war on agricultural land and rural livelihood in the name of urbanization, industrialization and infrastructure development.

The new bill gives complete freedom to all kinds of private companies to purchase land without even bothering about seeking any consent of concerned land-owners. The provision of seeking and obtaining the consent of “at least 80 per cent of the affected families” applies only when land is acquired by the government either for “immediate and declared use by private companies” or “with the ultimate intent of transferring it for the use of private companies”. And the government too is free from the consent clause when it acquires land for its own use whether for erecting dams, setting up nuclear plants, building military bases or constructing any project whatsoever.

The bill talks of carrying out social impact assessments (where acquired land exceeds 100 acres) and keeping irrigated, multi-crop land outside the purview of land acquisition, but only when land is acquired by the government. Who will determine whether some land is multi-crop or not? We have seen in the case of Singur how multi-cropped land was declared as mono-crop by the government. The bill promises compliance with existing land-related laws like PESA Act, 1996 or Forest Rights Act, 2006, or the land transfer acts in Schedule V (tribal-majority) areas. But the record of implementation of these two acts is marked by extensive violation as can be seen on the ground in states like Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat or Maharashtra. In Odisha, the central and state governments are bent upon evicting as many as twelve villages to hand over 4,000 acres of land to the South Korean steel giant POSCO even as villagers are insisting on their land rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006.

As for the Rehabilitation and Resettlement provisions of the bill, the corporate buyers will have to abide by them only when the size of the land acquired equals or exceeds 100 acres. The R&R provisions are also a big sham. It is common knowledge that sale deeds always hugely understate the market value of land and the new bill promises compensation to land-losers as multiples of average sale deed rate in the area. Apart from one-time compensation, the bill does promise annuity payment for twenty years, but an annuity of Rs. 2000 per month per affected family can hardly provide any meaningful assured income to a family that loses its all. There is talk of providing ‘mandatory employment’ for one person in every affected family, but if employment cannot be provided, a compensation of only Rs 200,000 will do! In other words, the UPA government’s ‘generous’ rehabilitation and resettlement package assesses agricultural income at Rs 2,000 per month and the value of employment at Rs. 200,000!

Global capitalism today is passing through bouts of severe recession. Many manufacturing sectors the world over are in deep crisis. Real estate and construction, mining and commercial agriculture (dedicated more to bio-fuel and horticulture than food production) remain the few most lucrative sectors in these recessionary times. No wonder then that capital is going all out to grab more and more land – the gateway to assured windfall gains in times of acute uncertainty and prolonged recession. This is the twenty-first century version of the predatory colonial occupation and brutal primitive accumulation of early capitalism.

In the name of repealing the land acquisition act of the colonial era, the Indian state has now taken upon itself the task of spearheading and serving global capitalism’s war on Indian land and Indian agriculture. The proposed LARR Bill 2011 is nothing but a manifesto of this war couched in deceptive phrases like ‘informed consent’, ‘rehabilitation and resettlement’, and ‘partnership in development’. Even where the state will not be directly involved in acquisition, the peasantry and landless labourers will be left at the mercy of unmitigated corporate coercion, unleashed by a whole network of intermediaries and facilitated by a pro-corporate state and its administration.

Food security was a key promise of the Congress and the UPA in the last Lok Sabha elections. Today the notion of food security has been reduced to monthly supply of 35 kg foodgrains to families earning less than Rs. 15 per day in rural areas and less than Rs. 20 in urban areas. This is a complete mockery of any meaningful notion of food security for a country like India. If food security has to guarantee the nutritional requirements of 1.2 billion Indians, India needs to produce much more food, and this in turn needs more land for agriculture. There can be no public purpose which is bigger than this. Defending agricultural land from the clutches of capital and its state is therefore the greatest task today of every patriotic and democratic Indian. Not acquisition, but protection of agricultural and forest land by all means is the cry of democracy.