K-Rail Protest | What entitles Kerala government to lay survey stones it asks people to not grub up?

Ever since the announcement of K-Rail SilverLine — Kerala government’s ambitious semi-high speed rail project which it believes would turnaround the fortune of the state — resentment has been building in the Opposition camp, and among environmental experts and study groups. In a few weeks, the government witnessed what it had initially disregarded as mild displeasure transpiring into righteous indignation by the people, like the state has not seen in the recent past. While the public fury was triggered by the laying of survey stones in private land, a Cabinet minister’s uncouth statement that people abetted by terrorist organisations were running amok and removing stones, only fanned the flames further.

Why did the police and the revenue department lay survey stones? Was it for social impact assessment, or for an alignment study, or for a land survey and acquisition? The reason was unintelligible until Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan clarified that the current survey was for conducting the social impact assessment for the project. Instead of damping down the problem, this explanation only compounds it.

Land acquisition is a sequential process which starts with a social impact assessment. After the social impact assessment, an expert committee appointed by the government must review the assessment and provide its recommendations to the government. The government has to then take inputs from the district administration and consider several other factors related to the livelihood of the people to be displaced, and then take a decision to acquire the minimum area of land needed for the project.

Did Kerala’s Left government follow these norms? Not really.

Laying Survey Stones

In October, the state government issued an order for conducting the social impact assessment and land acquisition. The order mentioned in no unclear terms that the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement Act of 2013 (LARR Act) shall be used for both purposes. In the first place, the Act does not mandate the government to lay survey stones for conducting a social impact assessment. It does not even warrant digging or physical marking in the land being surveyed for the study. Therefore, it is unlawful for the government to plant survey stones in private land in the pretext of social impact assessment.

On March 28, the Kerala High Court questioned the government’s move to plant survey stones.

Consulting Local Bodies And Issuing Public Notifications

Chapter 2 Section 4(1) and Chapter 2 Section 4(2) of the LARR Act, which pertain to consultation with local bodies and issuing notifications in the affected areas respectively, have been overlooked by the state government. Elected representatives themselves claim publicly that local bodies were not consulted ahead of the social impact assessment. People stopped in their tracks by the survey stones are the ones who call up their local representatives to inform about the development. No notices were published in the affected areas, thereby denying the people an opportunity to understand what was happening around them and their livelihood.

Public Hearings

Section 5 of the Act states that “… the appropriate Government shall ensure that a public hearing is held at the affected area, after giving adequate publicity about the date, time and venue for the public hearing, to ascertain the views of the affected families to be recorded and included in the Social Impact Assessment Report.” That is, instead of laying the survey stones, the Vijayan government should have first published the notification about the social impact assessment in the affected areas, and invited the people for a public hearing. Laying of stones without following these steps has only aggravated people’s concerns over the project.

Conducting Land Survey And Acquisition

As per the LARR Act, private land shall be dug, bored into, or marked only during the land survey phase, after a social impact assessment is done. Even then, the government must ensure that the land owner is “… afforded a reasonable opportunity to be present during the survey, by giving a notice of at least sixty days prior to such survey,” before entering upon and surveying and taking levels of the land. Even in the eventuality of using force to enter one’s premises, the government must give the occupier at least seven days’ notice in writing, of the intention to do so.

From these points it’s quite discernible that the Kerala government went off at a tangent after notifying the LARR Act for a social impact assessment, land survey, and land acquisition. In the absence of any formal communication to people on why the survey stones were planted in their private land, on what grounds did the government take action against those who grubbed up the stones and threw them away?

These provisions of the LARR Act have been listed out above because important as they are, the state government has not cared to follow any of these.

To abate the public wrath, the Left government may now discontinue planting survey stones across the length of the state, and start all over with the social impact assessment as laid out in the LARR Act. But then people will broach genuine concerns in the public hearings — concerns of greater gravity — about the environmental, economic, and technological impact of the project, about the compensation structure that lacks clarity, about the mortgage payment when the land falls in the buffer zone, and several more. The public hearings, in all likelihood, may turn out to be a plebiscite on the SilverLine project, which will be among the worst fears of the Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left government in Kerala.

Sreejith Panickar is a Kerala-based political commentator. Twitter: @PanickarS. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.