Will Gowda speak up for farmers now?

Will Gowda speak up for farmers now?
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: With Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy giving away 5472 acres of land in and around Bangalore to four real estate developers, there is enough curiosity as to how JD (S) president H D Deve Gowda will react to his son’s actions.

Gowda always resisted the idea of private investors taking away large tracts of farm land in the name of building enterprises. His bitter spat with Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy following his allegations that the IT major was appropriating lands far in excess of its needs is too recent for any recollection.

The Chief Minister, chairing the High Level Committee on industrial investments on March 24, cleared 8059 acres of land for a number of investoRs But what has kicked off a storm is a handful of real estate developers getting 1000-odd acres each.

According to Opposition leader in the Legislative Council H.K. Patil, owning of large areas of land need not indicate a company’s strength or productivity. Bangalore accounts for two-thirds of country’s IT exports, and all the IT companies together occupy less than 1000 acres of land.

Patil is right too. The IT bellwether Infosys did wonders in global markets, functioning from a 50-odd acre campus in the Electronic City. Hundreds of IT companies function from a cluster of complexes in the international tech park limited (ITPL), occupying about 25-acres of land near Whitefield. If large areas were a prerequisite for the success of IT companies, then small countries cannot have IT businesses at all.

The Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB) is being misused for all kinds of land acquisitions. When the British rulers first enacted Land Acquisition Act in 1984, it provided for acquiring land only for public purposes like widening or creation of roads, building dams, or any other utility of public use etc.

The Government never acquired private land for transferring to another private individual or company for developing a business purely for profit. It was seen as robbing one’s livelihood to enrich another. But a few years ago, the KIADB Act was so amended to include infrastructure projects within whose definition anything and everything falls.

This is not the first time private land developers are getting land through the KIADB in the name of IT or infrastructure development. It happened during the S M Krishna regime too, but this is, perhaps, for the first time developers have been able to take away thousands of acres. All that a developer does in the name of IT is to build complexes for renting or leasing to IT companies and houses for selling to IT professionals.

Once again, the Government has directed the KIADB to acquire the lands and hand them over to the developeRs Farm lands once again face the threat of acquisition. But the million dollar question is will Deve Gowda, as champion of farmers’ cause, speak up for them? After all, Gowda ran a tirade against NICE charging it with seeking to appropriate about 2450 acres of land in excess of the project’s needs. The land at stake now is more than double.

Interestingly, H K Patil is raising precisely the type of questions Deve Gowda had raised some time ago against the Government.