There is a need for devising effective rehabilitation packages so that the displaced are not deprived of the fruits of development.
Vivek Mehra,
Executive Director, PricewaterhouseCoopersOne way to achieve stability is to let the displaced reap the benefits by giving them a proportion of developed land for agriculture.
How long will we continue celebrating our potential even while restraining ourselves from realising it? How true are these significant words penned by none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as we, day after day, continue putting blocks in the path of our own progress?
The SEZ policy hiccups are clearly a repeated example of such blocks. What is the message we are sending to global investors who are eyeing the SEZs for setting up their global manufacturing plants?
The frantic calls I have received from a couple of global shoe manufacturers having time bound plans to manufacture sports shoes in SEZs in India, instead of China, wishing to employ over 40,000 people, are fully justified. How do they plan their global manufacturing if such uncertainty keeps coming up?
Making India a global manufacturing hub, I firmly believe, is the only solution for creating jobs for the 71 million young Indians entering the working age population in the next five years. We must remember that two-third of this population lives in the rural areas and survives on subsistence farming. They have all watched colour-TVs and are aware of the superior quality of living in urban centres.
Many of them do not want to till the land any more and aspire for a better future, which equates to working in an urban environment. The IT sector, no doubt, will provide job opportunities, but only to a few of the teeming millions and those too will be largely restricted to the urban educated youth. This is where SEZs can pitch in.
There is an emergent need to educate and train the rural youth for employability in the manufacturing sector. Thus the manufacturing sector needs to grow by leaps and bounds very quickly. This can only be achieved if the government and all political parties set aside their political agenda and put their collective force behind implementing policies which will make India an attractive destination for becoming a global manufacturing hub.
Giving a push to SEZs should be an essential component of this thrust. The SEZ policy, based on private sector financing and aimed at creating both industrial infrastructure and social infrastructure, is clearly an important step in this direction and deserves the incentives that have been given.
The present SEZ hiccup is a fall-out of bad land acquisition policy and politics. Clearly the state governments need to adopt pragmatic land acquisition policies so that it does not lead to deprivation among the displaced, but becomes a win-win situation. One way to achieve this is to let the displaced reap some benefits of the development and this can
be done by giving them developed land for agriculture.
For instance, 2 per cent of all land acquired should be kept aside to be developed by the SEZ developer and allotted as residential / commercial land on a proportional basis to the persons from whom the land has been acquired and other displaced persons. This can be done alongside the physical displacement so that resettlement is immediate.
The values of such allotted commercial / residential developed land would rise with the value of the SEZ development resulting in appropriate compensation - truly a win-win situation.
The present National Policy for resettlement and rehabilitation of Project Affected Families (NPRR-2003) has been in force since February 2004, much before the enactment of the SEZ Act in 2005. Moreover, several states like Orissa, MP, Maharashtra and so on have their own rehabilitation policies offering better benefit levels to the affected families.
Is it, therefore, justified to put on hold all SEZ applications pending a new rehabilitation policy? Rehabilitation of the affected families, no doubt, should be the top priority and responsibility of the SEZ developer and the respective state governments. But we need also to be careful that we do not continuously send wrong messages to global investors.
We must break the pattern of sending out messages of an inconducive policy environment,