(Co-authored by Sana Gangwani and Pallavi Bedi) The Standing Committee Report on the Land Acquisition and R&R Bill, 2011 was tabled in the Lok Sabha on May 17, 2012. The major changes to the Bill recommended by the Committee include:

  • Land may not be acquired for use by private companies and PPPs.
  • The role of the local governments should be expanded and made more participatory in the acquisition and R&R process. The role of Gram Sabhas should not be limited to consultation, but their consent should be obtained at different stages.
  • The Clause giving wide discretion to the government in notifying any project as infrastructure project should be deleted.
  • Threshold for R&R provisions should be fixed by the states and not the central government since sale and purchase of land is a state subject in the Constitution (Item 18, State List).
  • There should be a restriction on the acquisition of agricultural land.  The limit on the acquisition of such land should be fixed by the state governments.

For a detailed comparison of the Bill with the recommendations of the Standing Committee see here.

We need your ideas and inputs.  Ideas on how we can inform many more people who are interested in policy about what they can access on the PRS website. The mission of PRS is to strengthen the legislative process by making it better informed, more transparent and participatory. The statement has three important components: (a) Better informed: This implies that legislators and citizens need to be better informed about the implications of legislation.  For us in PRS, this implies producing easy-to-understand non-partisan analysis that can be made available to MPs and citizens.  This also includes our continual efforts to personally brief MPs and political parties on the details and implications of each Bill. (b) Transparent: We mean that all proceedings of Parliament and the work of MPs in Parliament should be easily accessible to citizens.  In an operational sense, this includes the effort we put into creating the Bill Track section on our website where every Bill that is pending in Parliament can be accessed, and the current status of the Bill can be tracked.  It also includes the MP Track section in which we have up-to-date information about the engagement levels of MPs in Parliament.  We also have a twitter page www.twitter.com/prslegislative and a Facebook presence. (c) Participatory: Which simply means that once citizens know the information, and would like to articulate a point of view, they should reach out to policy makers and get their point of view across to them.  To promote this, we have had a number of workshops with NGOs and have produced a primer on "Engaging with Policy Makers". These are just some examples of what we are doing in each of these three areas.  Our website has much more information. But we are increasingly of the view that we need to reach out many more people who are interested in policy -- even if it is sector specific.  We would be grateful for any ideas that you might have, which you can post as responses to this post. If you also have specific ideas on what you like on our website and what can be better, do let us know.  Thanks, in advance.