The vexed land issue: a triple jeopardy

Abstract

In India, land is emerging as the binding constraint on growth, employment generation and poverty alleviation. The vexed land issue, self-evident from the newspaper space on the topic and the agitated debate, has triple jeopardies or three dangers associated with it: (i) determining land ownership and titles; (ii) land being needed most where it is most scarce; and (iii) how many of the people affected by the proposed land-acquisition for a project have to give their consent before it can go ahead. The paper elaborates these three jeopardies and concludes in favour of moving to a Torrens System of land registration. For digitisation of land records, it suggests the roadmap followed in the securities market for guideposts. Given the tight land–man ratio, there is no option but to industrialise and urbanise rapidly. Some land will have to be acquired for infrastructure, such as roads, ports and airports, and urbanisation. The land required will be a small fraction of roughly 140 million hectares of the net sown area, and the impact on agricultural output can be neutralised by improving agricultural productivity. It is imperative to improve governance, remove the trust deficit and move to a consent clause of the majority of project-affected persons for an efficient solution to the vexed land issue.