Simpreet Singh of National Alliance of People's Movements, which is deeply fighting land grabs at home, calls India Inc's adventurism abroad "a kind neo-colonialism"
India among top 10 land grabbers, sellers: Report
Jayashree Nandi, TNN
NEW DELHI: India is among the top 10 nations to acquire land in both domestic and transnational deals, according to a report released this month by the Washington-based World Watch Institute (WWI). It lists India as a big investor in land globally and among the top 'land grabbers' because what is acquired is agricultural land.
The data has been sourced from an international coalition of NGOs and research groups called the Land Matrix project who have published the world's largest database of land deals struck since 2000. Around 70.2 million hectares of agricultural land worldwide have been sold or leased to private and public investors since 2000.
Of the 82 listed investor countries in the database, Brazil, India, and China account for 16.5 million ha, or around 24% of the total hectares sold or leased worldwide. India has acquired around 3.2 million ha from East Africa, mainly Ethiopia and Madagascar and 2.1 million ha from southeast Asia (Indonesia and Lao People's Republic).
Interestingly, India is also among top 10 countries where land has been acquired by other nations. As per the report, around 4.6 million ha land has been acquired from India in 113 separate deals.
WWI in its report dubs it 'land grab' because it refers to the large-scale purchase of agricultural land by public or private investors.
Agricultural land grab is likely to have a huge impact not just on ecology but also livelihoods of communities in these countries, according to the report.
"In many cases, the deals displace local farmers who already occupy and farm the land, but who frequently lack formal land rights or access to legal institutions to defend these rights," says authors of the report.
Simpreet Singh of National Alliance of People's Movements feels that the trend is alarming. "In the last few years India has been part several huge land deals. This is usually considered as the arrival of India in the global scenario. But it is a kind of neo-colonialism."
