There may not be any love lost between Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, but the Congress president seems to have sought inspiration from TMC slogan ‘Ma Maati Maanush’.
Under Sonia’s direction, the UPA government is coming up with a radical land-reform policy with special focus on women’s rights which, it feels, could be used as a trump card in the 2014 elections.
The highlight of the new policy would be the Kerala-Bengal model land reforms with tight land-ceiling limits and the “Right to Land” principle. The policy will also ensure that all rural homeless people shall be allotted 10-15 cents of land, and the land would be registered in women’s name only.
The responsibility of drafting the National Land Reforms Policy is with the Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh and the Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo, along with members of the Sonia-headed NAC, comprising Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and P V Rajagopal.
The committee had held a meeting to finalise the draft on February 6 and is planning to convene a meeting of all state ministers on April 6 to fine-tune the policy. “The new land policy will be in place by end of the year. Our impression is that the Congress president wants to pitch it as the ‘NREGA of 2014 elections’,” said a source who is part of the drafting committee.
According to the draft policy, a copy of which is available with the Express, the foremost function of the national land use policy would be to ensure the creation of a land pool. “In order to provide homestead land, and minimum agricultural land, and shelter to every family, it is essential that a land pool is created,” it said.
Stating that the current land ownership distribution in the country is “highly iniquitous and unjust,” the policy states that a new National Land Use Plan (NLUP) can go a long way in ensuring and improving land access to the poor.
The policy also moots that states should introduce government orders mandating joint registration and joint titles for marital property in the names of both husband and wife.
The new policy insists that the land allotted to public and private agencies for various purposes through acquisition, selling or leasing, shall come under the state government’s land pool by reversion, if the land is not used within five years in accordance with the purposes.
On the land reforms front, the draft policy states that there is an urgent need to revisit the land ceiling limits and that it should be implemented with retrospective effect.
According to it, every state should revise its ceiling limits if the existing limit is more than 10 acres in the case of irrigated land, and 15 acres for non-irrigated land.
“The ceiling limit for absentee landlords and non-resident landowners may be fixed at 50 per cent of the normal ceiling limits for various categories. Absentee landlords and non-resident landowners may be strictly defined,” it said.
The policy says that only the erstwhile Left-ruled states like West Bengal and Kerala have succeeded better than others in pro-poor agrarian reform. “Lessons must be learnt from this experience,” it said.