West Bengal’s New Government Clears Land for 33 Industries, Weighs Land Pooling Over Acquisition

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West Bengal. Under a new BJP government, West Bengal is once again debating how to assemble land for industry, writes Subhamoy Maitra in The Economic Times column “Das Kapital Formation”. The debate uses three distinct mechanisms. Acquisition is compulsory purchase by the State under a statutory framework, where the owner’s consent is not decisive. Negotiated purchase relies on voluntary agreement between landowner and buyer. Land pooling allows owners to contribute their land to a development scheme and receive back a smaller but serviced — that is, provided with roads, water and power — and potentially more valuable plot. According to the column, the State has begun examining land pooling, industrial parks and changes to landholding and land-utilisation rules, and is considering ways of making large contiguous parcels available without directly acquiring individual agricultural plots. The government has cleared land for 33 industries, and the land is to be handed over before Durga Puja; the real test, the author says, will be whether these allocations translate into timely project execution, employment and sustained private investment. Bengal’s problem is not simply a shortage of land but a shortage of large, contiguous and legally usable parcels: fragmented holdings, overlapping claims and restrictions on land use can make an apparently simple project extraordinarily complicated. Earlier attempts to create land banks from idle public sector land ran into precisely this problem, as available parcels were often too small or fragmented for large investors. The author recalls that two decades ago large sections of Bengal’s political class mobilised against industrial projects in Singur and Nandigram, and that many of those actors are now part of the new political establishment or have moved to other formations; the Left Front came to power in 1977 with a clear intention to pursue land reform for the landless. Many of the legal instruments required already exist, he argues, and a new set of laws will not by itself rebuild the State’s industrial land bank. Large parcels are rarely available near major cities, so industry may have to move farther out, where land disputes and infrastructure gaps can be greater, and industrialisation must create a stake for local communities. His central line: land can be assembled through legislation, negotiation or planning, but capital can only be attracted through confidence. The syllabus link is land as a factor of production and the institutional credibility that determines investment.

Static syllabus linkage

1. Land is a State subject, but acquisition is concurrent. Under the Seventh Schedule, “land” — including rights in or over land, land tenures and the transfer and alienation of agricultural land — is Entry 18 of the State List. “Acquisition and requisitioning of property” is Entry 42 of the Concurrent List, so both Parliament and State legislatures can make laws on it. The right to property was removed from the list of Fundamental Rights by the 44th Amendment in 1978 and is now a constitutional right under Article 300A, which says no person shall be deprived of property save by authority of law.
2. The 2013 Act made acquisition slow and costly by design. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 replaced the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. It requires the consent of at least 80% of affected families for acquisition for private companies and 70% for public-private partnership projects, a Social Impact Assessment for most projects, and compensation that in rural areas can reach up to four times the market value once a multiplier and solatium are applied. It also mandates rehabilitation and resettlement for those who depend on the land, including landless workers.
3. Land pooling is a planning tool with a long Indian history. Under land pooling, owners surrender land to an authority, which lays out roads and services and returns a share of the developed land to them in proportion to their contribution, keeping the rest for infrastructure and sale to recover costs. Gujarat’s Town Planning Schemes under the Gujarat Town Planning and Urban Development Act, 1976 are the classic Indian model. Andhra Pradesh used land pooling in 2015 to assemble land for Amaravati, and Delhi notified a land pooling policy in 2018; outcomes have depended on whether the authority actually delivered the developed plots.
4. Singur and Nandigram changed the politics of land in India. In 2006 the West Bengal government acquired about 997 acres at Singur for the Tata Nano car plant; after protests Tata Motors moved the project to Sanand in Gujarat in 2008. In March 2007, police firing at Nandigram, where land was sought for a chemical hub, killed protesters and turned public opinion against forced acquisition. In 2016 the Supreme Court declared the Singur acquisition illegal and ordered the land returned. These events shaped the 2013 Act and the State’s later reluctance to acquire land for private industry.

Why UPSC loves this

1. Land acquisition is a perennial GS3 theme. The syllabus names “land reforms in India” and “investment models” in GS3. Questions on land acquisition, the 2013 Act and its effect on industrialisation recur, and land pooling is an increasingly common alternative asked about.
2. Land connects polity, economy and society. The Seventh Schedule, Article 300A and Fifth Schedule protections make land a GS2 issue; its role in agrarian distress and displacement makes it a GS1 and GS3 issue. Answers that connect these dimensions score well.
3. Institutional credibility is the new frame for investment questions. The examiner increasingly asks why reforms fail to attract investment. This story gives a clean argument: rules, not incentives, determine the cost of capital, and a history of reversals raises that cost.

Analysis

1. Land pooling solves consent but not the problem of many claimants. In West Bengal, land reform recorded the rights of bargadars — sharecroppers with heritable tenancy — which means that a single plot can have an owner and a recorded cultivator, besides unrecorded workers. Land pooling returns a plot to the owner, but unless the scheme also compensates tenants and labourers, the people who work the land lose their livelihood without gaining a plot. This is precisely the fault line that turned Singur into a crisis. A pooling scheme designed only for title-holders would therefore repeat the old conflict in a new form.
2. The value of a pooled plot depends entirely on state capacity. Owners accept a smaller plot only because they expect it to be worth more once developed. That expectation depends on the government building roads, drains and power lines on time and keeping its promises across changes of government. Amaravati shows the risk: after the 2019 change of government in Andhra Pradesh and the proposal to split the capital, farmers who had pooled their land were left waiting for developed plots. Land pooling is thus a loan from farmers to the state, secured only by the state’s credibility.
3. Credibility is built by rules, not by announcements. Clearing land for 33 industries before Durga Puja is a strong signal, but investors will ask whether the terms will survive a change in political mood. As the author notes, investors can price an unofficial cost, but it is much harder to price changing rules and administrative discretion. A transparent, rule-based allotment policy with published criteria, fixed timelines and an independent grievance mechanism would do more for investment than faster discretionary allocations.
4. Opposition politics rewards agitation; governing rewards investment. The column’s most striking claim is that many who opposed Singur and Nandigram are now in the government. Rather than accusing them of inconsistency, it is more useful to note that incentives change with office. The lesson for institutional design is that policy on land should be insulated from electoral cycles, through legislation and bipartisan frameworks, so that every change of government does not reopen the question of whether industrial land can be assembled.
5. Moving industry away from cities shifts the burden to infrastructure. Large parcels are available mainly far from Kolkata and other cities, where connectivity, housing and services are weak. That raises the public investment required and makes land only one part of the cost of attracting industry. It also means that the local communities who give up land are far from the urban jobs that industry creates, unless projects are designed to employ and train them. The idea of giving communities a stake — through equity, jobs or annuities — is not charity but a way to make land assembly politically durable.

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