
Nitin Gadkari, senior minister, today offered a creative assessment for the government's status on its proposed land reforms. "We are not on back foot. We are on front foot. We are those who hit fours and sixes," Mr Gadkari said.
Till about four months ago, he was the Union Minister for Rural Development and is seen as one of the main forces behind the ordinance or executive order used in December, to make it easier for businesses to buy land for infrastructure and industry. The ordinance will lapse if it is not ratified by this session of Parliament, which has so far seen the opposition decrying the proposal as "anti-farmer."
In Parliament today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the government is ready to make changes to the ordinance in consultation with the opposition. "We are ready to fix anything (in the decree) that is against farmers," Mr Modi said. But he also flayed the Congress for insisting that the law it had introduced while it was in power was a better option. "If your law was so great, why were you defeated so completely in the elections?" he asked.
Mr Modi and the BJP trounced the Congress-led coalition government in May last year; since then, the Congress has accumulated a collection of staggering losses in other state elections.
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