The Plunder of Land - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 116

who later became a minister in the state's cabinet, shot a bar attendant in 1999 at a Delhi
nightspot when she refused to serve him a drink. There were some 200 witnesses to what
became known as the landmark 'Jessica Lal case', 13 but many 'turned hostile', refusing to
give evidence. The youth was acquitted in 2006, but he was re-arrested after a public out-
cry and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The social dislocation and other problems caused by rapid urban development will con-
tinue for decades ahead, albeit maybe more slowly than during the millennial decade of
high economic growth. The McKinsey report forecast in 2010 that 590m people would be
living in Indian cities by 2030 - up from 340m in 2008 and 290m in 2001. It said there
would then be 68 cities of more than a million people including 13 with more than four
million and six with 10m. Delhi and Mumbai would be among the world's five largest cit-
ies. 'We will witness over the next 20 years an urban transformation the scale and speed of
which has not happened anywhere in the world except in China,' said the report. 14
Land Legislation
People who lose or voluntarily give up their land for industrial development have rarely
been compensated adequately, and the laws and regulations have varied in different states
(land is a 'concurrent' subject in India's Constitution, which means that both the central
and state governments have powers). Records of landholding are often not available, or
cannot be easily verified, which complicates acquisition. This has led companies to prefer
that governments acquire land for them using the 1894 legislation's powers to acquire land
compulsorily, often at low prices that do not reflect the real market price. In forest and tri-
bal areas, it has meant that local people have not been properly consulted, as the stories in
the next chapter show.
People giving up their land are often offered jobs in the new projects. This has commonly
been one job per family, which can work well with unskilled jobs during construction work,
but not so well when projects are completed and companies find local people unsuitable for
skilled employment - for example, in a car factory. Some are given unspecialized jobs such
as that of security guards, but many cannot even do those duties, so feel doubly shut out
from their traditional occupations by both the real estate boom that they missed and the in-
dustrial boom that they cannot share. The poor also frequently lose out when compensation
packages are being handed out. Land acquisition officers typically take a percentage cut to
improve compensation amounts. In a relatively minor but illustrative example in Andhra
Pradesh, 15 the government took over land for a highway project from a woman who had
only recently bought it. She successfully won a court case for more compensation than the
government had initially allocated, but the local land acquisition officer insisted on receiv-
ing a 10 per cent payment for releasing the money.