Buy land, they're not making it anymore, said Mark Twain. At last, India is moving to secure this basic source of human power
In modern history, Kurukshetra may be a small, impoverished town in Haryana with a feudatory subplot. But it was here that the mother of all land disputes was settled three thousand years ago, in an 18-day-long epic war of the Mahabharata. It is pertinent, then, that India’s most ambitious piece of land reforms ever should take shape here. A million battles more bitter than the historic one are raging in India’s courts right now, over disputed land ownerships. The underlying curse has been the lack of a clear and conclusive system of land titles, which opens up avenues for manipulation of records and stealing of property.
In India, however, the reform has taken much longer. Land is primarily a state subject and each state follows its own method of record-keeping. Documents are in diverse languages. Instances of more than one person holding the papers for the same piece of land are common. Thousands of plots have no documents at all. As a result, land registration is often controlled by touts and bribe-seeking government clerks. A dangerous new trend was discovered recently when anonymous owners had bought land on the India-Pakistan border. On the other hand, tribal people are fighting after their lands, to the extent of one million acres across the nation, were taken away from them for development.
(This story appears in the 02 July, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)