Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
isters of environment who were drawn from the DMK in Tamil Nadu facilitated illegal
mining and real estate development across the country. What the minister allowed from
his office in Delhi was echoed down through his ministry, agencies and state governments.
Added to this, a lack of urban planning meant that there were few laws and regulations to
control such activities, and those that did exist were bent or ignored.
Agricultural land in India has often been seized by state governments and their agencies,
and by corporate friends and cronies, using legislation that stemmed from land acquisition
laws passed in 1894, half a century before India's independence. These laws, which were
only replaced in 2013, permitted compulsory government purchase of land for a 'public
purpose', a provision that was intended to be used for developments such as highways,
government buildings, airports, schools and slum clearance. It came to be used, instead,
to acquire land for private sector projects including special economic zones 5 and the Tata
Nano car factory that was aborted in West Bengal in 2008. It was also used to grab ex-
cessive amounts of land for real estate deals around projects such as airports and highways
that were built and operated under suspect public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements.
Sources have suggested to me that excessive land was also made available for commer-
cial developments like information technology company campuses in order to boost market
prices of stocks in which politicians had invested.
Capital Dislocation
In the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh that surround Delhi, rural areas and farmland
have been bought up, speculated over and developed in the past three decades, and at a
rapidly accelerating pace in the past ten years. This has created a vast National Capital Re-
gion (NCR) with a population of over 22m, including 16m in Delhi itself, covering nearly
13,000 sqm. It includes Gurgaon in Haryana, which stretches for miles of ribbon develop-
ment to the south-west along the Jaipur highway, and Noida to the south-east in UP. There
are also growing industrial centres at Ghaziabad and Faridabad along a highway that runs
to the tourist centre and industrial city of Agra. Shiny blocks of offices, plus less grand
factories and call centres have spread across farmland and around old villages, together
with both plush and sleazy hotels, massive blocks of flats, shopping malls and golf courses.
This has created instant wealth for a few lucky developers and landowners, but a loss of
livelihood for the less fortunate landless and labourers.
Prices have rocketed. For example, the price of farmland a few kilometres from a high-
way in an area that has yet to be urbanized by the Gurgaon sprawl has risen 100 times over
the last 16 years from Rs 2 lakh an acre in the late 1990s, when it was considered a remote
rural location, to Rs 2 crore now that tower blocks of flats are appearing on the horizon,
indicating that it will be part of an urban area in a few years. Another plot in a fashion-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search