Even as the Land Acquisition Amendment Bill is stuck in Parliament, Maharashtra government does not want this delay to derail its ambitious plan to rework the state's skyline. CNBC-TV18's Alexander Mathew reports that the state government is keenly studying how it can replicate Gujarat's land pooling model to further its own agenda.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has ambitious plans for his state that revolve around getting land to support key infrastructure projects -- from special townships, to new airports to slum re-development to affordable housing. With many arguing that the current land acquisition policy is ineffective, Fadnavis is looking for alternatives.
One of the alternatives is land pooling - a concept that Gujarat has been using for over a century, and one that's already in the works for Navi Mumbai.
"In the Naina (Navi Mumbai Airport Influence Notified Area), which is an entire big city we are making near the Navi Mumbai airport. It's bigger than Mumbai. We are actually planning to have a land pooling pattern where we don't acquire the land. We actually pool the land together,” said Fadnavis.
Land pooling: a viable option?
In this, privately held land is transferred to the government. In exchange the land owner gets a percentage of his holding back at another location.
They may also get additional incentives like additional floor space index at their new plots as compensation. “Sixty percent land goes back to the owner and 40 percent land comes to the government,” added Fadnavis.
People will actually get a lot of benefits from land pooling. The value of their 60 percent land actually becomes 200 percent.
Land pooling benefits people
Fadnavis is confident that this approach will help his ambitious Maharashtra Housing Policy, which targets building 11 lakh houses in the Mumbai metropolitan region and 8 lakh houses in the rest of Maharashtra.
But experts are not sold on the idea yet. They say the sharp difference in land valuations across the island city may deter landowners from participating. Also, that the Maharashtra government doesn’t have the best credentials when it comes to delivering projects on time.
Says Gulam Zia, Executive Director, Knight Frank, “In the last decade or two, track record of completion of many of public infrastructure or public projects has been horrible to say the least. And in land pooling scheme, there has got to be a conviction from those who are giving away their land in a certain timeline within which they will get their valuation or their lands back for their own calculation and purposes.”
But Maharashtra government is confident that it will work. This explains the fact that there are three mentions of land pooling in the draft of the Maharashtra Housing Policy - Firstly, for the acquisition of over 1,000 acres of land by MHADA for housing projects. Secondly, for public-private partnership ventures and thirdly, for the creation of special townships.
The biggest challenge is to successfully convert what sounds like a great plan on paper into a winning solution.
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