Special Track on Land Governance and Policy Land is a central issue in development research, practice and policy. It cuts across development thinking in livelihoods, governance and increasingly in sustainability. Broadly speaking, land tenure systems, property rights and their governance constitute a key determinant of economic development, social equity, justice and lasting peace. Historically, the land tenure system was a central instrument that impacted political power, economic production, and social relationships. In recent times, a variety of factors – international food crisis, increasing conversion of land for production of bio-fuel, large-scale land acquisition, loss of communal tenure, widespread peasants’ and popular struggles for land, rampant land grabs, and women’s struggle for land rights – have brought the agenda of land back in development discourse and made land governance ever more challenging globally as well as in India. In India land is a state subject and a plethora of laws and agencies are involved in governing land. The basic structure of land governance was laid by the colonial government. In view of the centrality of land revenue to the colonial administration, the British government in India evolved a robust system of survey, records, settlement and tenure. However, in Independent India land administration was a neglected area of governance as land revenue was no longer a major source of revenue for the government. The cumulative impact of this neglect has affected every aspect of land governance in India and the system is found wanting in the face of the emerging challenges. A sound land governance system needs a policy which balances the concerns of development, equity and environment while meeting an ever increasing and competing demand for land. The absence of such a policy in any of the Indian states is a major shortcoming. The institutions that are charged with making and implementing land policies and laws suffer from serious lack of capacity and overlapping jurisdictions. In the years since then, and especially in the post-liberalization era, some of these reforms have been become obsolete and a hindrance to development. Demands to review the existing land reform laws and to launch a fresh round of reforms in consonance with the current realities have been growing shriller. The new land acquisition law has sought to make fundamental changes in India’s century-old unjust land acquisition process but it is resented by industry. Its status is unclear even months after it came into effect as a political consensus on it has remained elusive. Further, even basic land records in India are not up-to-date in spite of deploying modern information technology in a big way to streamline them during the past two decades. It is a paradox that these reforms coincided with a phase of rampant land grabbing. The state of land governance, therefore, needs to be understood in perspective in order to devise policy and institutional solutions to address its problems. In this context, this session on “land policy and governance” seeks to extend the frontiers of the land debate in the direction of evolving a better land governance system. Session Chair: Ashok Sircar Ashok Sircar, Ph.D is a Professor in the School of Development at Azim Premji University (APU). He heads APU’s Livelihoods Initiative. Ashok has worked for more than 15 years in the development sector as a practitioner and researcher, prior to which he worked as technical professional and entrepreneur in the corporate sector. Ashok’s development sector experience spans the thematic areas of land rights & land governance, livelihoods and local governance. His work on land has focussed on providing technical support to land allocation programmes in different states, convergence of states’ welfare programmes with land allocation, research and advocacy on women’s land rights, capacity-building of civil society instigation on land governance and land rights, and land legal aid to the poor. He has worked extensively in multiple states of India in programme design and implementation as well as in research-based policy advocacy.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 06:14:29 +0000
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