(this was published in Firstpost last week)
So, after roti, it’s going to be makaan.
There has been talk for some time now
that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is working on a right to
housing legislation. Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh had made a
commitment to this effect to the Ekta Parishad – a network of activist groups –
last year, as it led a Jan Satyagraha march to Delhi in October last year.
One had hoped that saner voices in the
government would nip this in the bud. But with elections looming in the
horizon, sanity obviously goes out of the window. So Ramesh’s ministry has
finalised a draft National Right to Homestead Bill, 2013, the details of which
have been published in The Indian Express.
The highlights of the housing scheme are
the following
1: Every landless and homeless poor
family in rural areas will be entitled to a `homestead’ of not less than 10 cents”
(0.1 acre, or 4,356 sq ft).
2: Homestead
is a dwelling with adequate housing facilities. The definition of ‘adequate’
includes access to basic services (drinking water, electricity, roads and
public transport), appropriate location, accessibility and cultural adequacy.
3: This right has to be enforced within
five years of the enactment of the law.
When Finance Minister P Chidambaram
unveiled a budget shorn of election-driven populist announcements, there were
cynical predictions that this was merely to please rating agencies by providing
a semblance of an effort at fiscal consolidation. And that pork barrel
giveaways would resurface as we got closer to 2014. The cynics are being proven
right. The Indian Express report says the Bill could be tabled in the monsoon
session of Parliament.
Sure, it’s unfortunate that India has close
to 8 million homeless rural families. The Twelfth Plan working group on rural
housing estimates the shortage in the Plan period (2012-17) at around 40
million. But is giving such families a right to housing the answer? There’s
reason to believe it isn’t.
It’s not as if the problem of
homelessness has been ignored completely by policy makers. The Indira Awas
Yojana (IAY) was started in 1985 to help below poverty line rural families
build houses or upgrade existing kutcha houses. The central and state
governments share the costs on a 75:25 formula.
In 2005 the UPA government brought it
under the umbrella of its flagship Bharat Nirman scheme to give it extra
support and thrust. Implementation of the scheme may have improved –
achievement of targets has increased from 66 percent in 2007-08 to above 80
percent – but it has also been dogged by scams, with stories coming from as far
as Assam and Kashmir, apart
from Bihar and Odisha. There are
irregularities in the selection of beneficiaries and the quality of
construction has also been found to be extremely poor.
The IAY also has a provision for the
government to provide land for families on its waiting list who don’t have
land. That’s easier said than done. Where is the government going to get the
land from? No doubt, from all the surplus land that state governments have
acquired under various land reform legislations or donated under the Bhoodan
movement started by Acharya Vinobha Bhave. But what is the record of such land
being redistributed (which was the rationale behind the land ceiling laws and
Bhoodan)?
Let me quote Ramesh’s words back to him.
“Five million acres has been pledged as part of the Bhoodan movement over the
last 60 years but only 50 percent has actually been distributed…This is a land
scam beyond everything, without any parallel,” Ramesh said last year. (See the
report here.) A Land Reform Commission that Nitish Kumar appointed in Bihar also came to a similar conclusion.
Even in West Bengal,
which is supposed to be a benchmark for implementation of land reforms, the
iconic Operation Barga has not been as successful as it has been claimed to be.
For every registered bargadar (sharecroppers who were given redistributed land)
there are several unregistered ones. Land sharks and other goons have taken
away land from people who got titles. Can Ramesh ensure that people who get
land under his proposed law will not have it taken away, either forcibly or by
subterfuge? Many of the landless have been allotted land, they have not got
titles. It would be better for Ramesh to focus on that first, even though it is
a state subject.
Forget land grabbers. The proposed law
says it will give land to the landless. But the government can also take away
land for public purposes. And its record of compensating those whose land
is taken away (especially those with small patches of land) is abysmal, at
best. There’s an inherent contradiction here. Would it not be better to restore
the right to property (abolished by the 44th Constitution Amendment in 1978)
and enforce it?
These are reasons enough to conclude
that a right to housing will be meaningless at best and a scam at the worst.
There’s no point arguing that a scheme
or an idea is good and that it is the implementation problem that needs fixing.
Grand ideas, which are not practical to implement, are nothing more than empty
dreams. So long as they remain dreams, there’s no problem. But when they become
the basis of pushing through laws with huge financial implications for a
country with a faltering economy, there’s a very serious problem, indeed.
This whole rights-based entitlement
approach of the UPA is hugely problematic.
There is ample evidence that each of the
rights that it is championing – education, work, food and now housing – can be
better achieved by means other than legislated guarantees. Ending the licence
raj in education can ensure better access to schools, even for the poor.
Unshackling agriculture and small rural and urban enterprises could generate
more and productive jobs than NREGA. Ending distortions in the food economy can
ensure that food stocks are managed more efficiently so that people don’t go
hungry.
But the record of the UPA in listening
to voices of reason when it is set on reviving the mai-baap state is poor.
So what’s the next right it will confer,
as we move closer to 2014? Kapda?
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