In Karnataka now there is a raging controversy over the State government’s allotment of about nearly 1,000 acres of prime agricultural lands on the outskirts of Bangalore for the IT major, Infosys. Mr.Deve Gowda, the former Prime Minister, had raised this issue on the ground the allotment to one company, against others not asking or getting allotted agriculture lands under the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board is seen by the former PM as a clear political favour. Did the farmers get the market price for the lands alienated? It is not clear. If the farmers didn’t get the prevailing market price for their lands, then, it is clearly a gross act of injustice. In West Bengal too, there is a raging controversy over the allotment of largest chunks of prime agricultural land, as large as 5,000 acres for an industrial township by the CPI (M) government headed by the most qualified Marxist Chief Minister in the country!
In Karnataka itself there was recently the discussion in the Forum for Land Rights. It was found about nine lakh acres of land were in unauthorized cultivation. There were also about ten lakh applications for regularization of the unauthorized cultivation of agriculture lands. What does this mean?
What these two current developments in the Indian agricultural policy scenario highlight, they highlight an unprecedented ideological changes in our socio-economic thinking are not yet fully openly debated. There is a conspiracy of silence on the part of serious politicians. Let us leave out the gullible politicians. The latter will say and do anything to keep themselves in power and thereby leaving their States to remaining poverty and backwardness. There is any number of these politicians today in almost all the States. They are in a large number in Kerala. Where land reforms had been the fundamentalist belief of the CPI(M)/CIP fraternity. So, Kerala, as pointed by many experts remains in a paradoxical stage of development. Kerala model was commended for long by progressive economists like Prof. Amartya Sen. Now, Sen is nowhere in this debate and he is intriguingly silent where West Bengal is fighting its ideological battle to move forward in the development league.
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