One thing they certainly did right in Gujarat is the construction of the peripheral ring road. This was carried out without land acquisition - something that our BDA will never do. Contrary to what many people think, it is not necessary to acquire land to develop new roads or even layouts. The much easier way is reconstitution where you simply redistribute the developed land among existing land-owners in the entire area, and each one gives up a fraction of his land (about 11%) to get the benefit of development. In the process, plots are made regular-shaped, and all the infra (roads, pipes, footpaths, etc) can be laid in one go. So why does BDA like to acquire land for its projects? Because acquisition is an arbitrage game played by middlemen. The whole idea is to grab land from existing owners at each prices, and sell it to preferred buyers at managed prices. For that, acquisition is necessary to dispossess the current owners. When Siddaiah was the BDA Commissioner, a formal state-to-state visit was organised to see some of the urban development work in Gujarat. He was convinced that reconstitution was a better approach than acquisition, and proposed to do away with the old system of land development favoured by BDA and its partners-in-crime. But this idea did not last long in BDA ... soon they were back to announcing Kempegowda Layout and thousands of sites and so on. The whole thing is a racket. The peripheral ring road can easily be built for 1/5th of the money that is currently budgeted. But the other 4/5 is for acquisition and resale ... the usual crimes in which BDA has been complicit for decades. Every CM and Bangalore minister is fully aware of this, but without exception they have blessed this approach rather than do anything to end it.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 05:53:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015