New Delhi:
Tractors that have turned into fire pits, their flames leaving what was a cloud-free sky scrambling for cover. Two young boys being slapped by men in uniform. A 70-year-old woman examining the shattered windows of her car. These are the images that have hurtled the villages of Bhatta and Parasul into the national headlines. They are located in Greater Noida, and their farmers say are being gypped out of lakhs of rupees by the government that tells them their land has to be handed over for a new expressway. Literally, highway robbery.
The two villages were off-limits till this morning after a weekend that saw at least four people killed as protesting farmers and the police exchanged fired. Undeterred, a series of politicians tried to head to Greater Noida on Wednesday, but were arrested and forced to abandon their journey. The issue is a political landmine, and it has given opposition parties a new opening against UP Chief Minister Mayawati.
In 2001, her government announced that a new six-lane highway would link Delhi to Agra. The 165-kilometre Yamuna Expressway is meant to open in October . Around it, there are plans and construction for extensive industrial, commercial and residential development. Those projects will make big money for the government and for real estate companies. Those who actually owned that land, however, have no share in the spoils.
People like Irshad Ali, who is the fourth generation of a family that has made its living from growing wheat near the Ground Zero that Bhatta has morphed into. "I was forced to sell my land for 7-8 lakhs a bigah when the market rate was 15 lakhs," he says. "I didn't want to sell my land...but who can fight the government?"
Mayawati's government has neen using an archaic clause of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act which allows it to take over agricultural land with virtually no notice.
Farmers were paid a little over Rs 800 per square metre. The same land was sold to developers at Rs 3200 a metre. And those developers are now offering residential plots, for example, at more than Rs 14,000 a metre.
The Jaiprakash Group, contracted to build the highway, was given 6000 acres by the state government. The company says that it needs to develop that land to offset the Rs 10,000 crore it will spend on constructing the Yamuna Expressway. There are ten other companies like Waves, Paras, 3C who have also been given the land that was acquired from farmers at fantastically low prices.
Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh announced today that the cabinet has agreed to amend the Land Acquisition Act to ensure farmers are better protected. The government will have to clearly define the purpose of the public project for which land needs to be acquired. Farmers will also be entitled to higher prices as compensation.
(Watch: Cabinet to ammend Land Acquisition Act says Vilasrao Deshmukh)