Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has
launched Town Planning Scheme (TPS) mechanism to fast track area based
infrastructure issues for 25 smart cities in the country. The ministry would
provide an assistance to every city Rs. 2 crores of central assistance for
planning purposes. The Town and Country Planning Organization (TCPO), located
in Delhi, will provide hand holding support.
In regimes wherein lands are privately
owned, as in all capitalist countries – in contrast lands are owned by the
government in China and other socialist countries – it is difficult to obtain
lands for public purposes such as for roads, laying of transport infrastructure,
laying water and sanitation lines, for education and health facilities, and
open and green spaces. These come in the category of public goods that give
benefit to all the population while at the same time it is difficult to charge
from them the full market value of land. If so charged, either the price of
some of these facilities would sky-rocket – more than even what the education
and health facilities in the private sector charge – or some of them would be
unaffordable, such as open and green spaces.
In India, ongoing urban growth is expected
to exacerbate the existing challenges of unplanned urbanization, informal
housing, and access to basic services, particularly for low-income populations.
Addressing these challenges requires the availability of public lands, which is
extremely challenging in privately owned land regimes. Due to a growing
population and lack of appropriate planning, cities’ peripheral areas—also
called urban extension areas—sprawl in an unplanned manner, without access
roads. This makes it extremely challenging to lay trunk infrastructure, reduces
the amount of public land available for social amenities and green spaces, and
leads to a lack of financing for infrastructure investments. The scarcity of
public land makes provision of social housing difficult, even if national funds
are made available for doing so
Indian cities lack open spaces.
Till recently, lands for public goods’
provisioning were acquired through Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which was
amended through countrywide discussions into Right to Fair Compensation and
Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (RFCTLARR)
Act. This new legislation is more equitable, transparent, and fair to
landowners (the farmers on the urban periphery). But, urban planners and state
governments are finding it lengthy, cumbersome and expensive. Hence, in its
place, Town Planning Scheme is being proposed to be adopted for urban expansion
areas or for development of urban periphery areas. Gujarat has been implementing
the TPS since a long time, and more vigorously since 1999 and unlike the
‘Gujarat Model’ promoted in general in India, the TPS has seen partial success.
The TPS works on a philosophy of win-win
solution for land owners whose lands are being acquired and for the city
government that wants lands for public purposes. TPS is a process of pooling
and reconstitution & reallocating lands followed by appropriating parts for
public purposes, such as for roads (15%), social and physical amenities (5%), open
and green spaces (5%), housing for socially and economically weaker sections
(10%) and sale of lands for raising finance for infrastructure investments
(15%), from the land parcel of the owner. Compensation is provided to the land
owner for the land appropriated at the jantri rates (official land rate) but
adjusted for the cost of investments made in infrastructure. This means that if
the infrastructure costs are higher than the compensation price, the land owner
has to pay the planning authority what is termed as betterment charges.
Vice-versa in case of value of compensation is more than the infrastructure
costs. These decisions are taken for each owner, plot by plot. So far so good.
But, the real world is different than what
urban planners think of and what the urban plans portray and plan for. When the
TPS of an area, with size from 100 hectare (ha) to 1,500, is prepared, location
of some plots of land change in case the land parcel is reserved for public
amenities of a green space or even roads. The decision regarding reconstitution
and reallocation are done after negotiations with the land owners. The second
round of negotiations happens with the land owners for financial settlement. In
a sense, the TPS process allows for negotiations with the land owners, and
hence is equitable. Equity is also embedded in the fact that the lands are made
available for public purposes. The TPS has been widely used in Ahmedabad and
Surat in Gujarat and not in other cities of the state.
The benefits are: Ahmedabad has used TPS
lands for resettling about 20,000 households evicted due to urban
infrastructure projects. Their locations are spread across the city (see figure
1), with significant proportion located on city’s periphery. Ofcourse, all has
not been hunky-dory with the resettlement process as many households pushed out
on the periphery of the city have been immiserized. But, for the first time in
urban India, resettlement has been provided to slum households evicted due to
infrastructure projects. Ahmedabad has also higher road network density than
other cities in India (see figure 2).
In Ahmedabad, till now, informal
settlements on private lands have not been evicted. We are not sure of the
future. But, in such settlements, lands could not be made available for public
purposes. Thus, the TPS mechanism does not work on brownfield sites, that is in
already developed parts of the city. It works only in the immediate periphery
of the city wherein the land price escalation is expected due to urbanisation
as well as infrastructure investments and hence land owners are not unwilling
to give up a proportion of their lands.
The TPS mechanism does not work at all in
the greenfield sites, that is for planning within urbanizing limits of the city
where development is expected after a 15-20 years. Such lands are still used
for farming. If parts of such agricultural lands are appropriated through TPS
mechanism, the farmers, who are already under great economic stress, would
further lose their livelihood and go down the poverty route. The desire for
planned development in rural areas surrounding an urban area has led to a
situation of conflict of urban planning authority with the villages. For
example, in case of Ahmedabad, 68 villages of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar
districts have demanded withdrawal of a notification declaring their village
lands (a total area of 625 sq km) to be part of the Ahmedabad Urban Development
Authority and thus be brought under the TPS mechanism.
Pre-empting appropriation of farm lands for
planned development of the peripheral areas of a city is also abuse of the
mechanism. In Gujarat, the Special Investment Region (SIR) Act of the state has
made mandatory use of TPS mechanism in the proposed SIRs such as Dholera (also
declared as a smart city), and Dahej. This means that instead of RFCTLARR Act,
2013 (the current land acquisition act that gives fair compensation to the
farmers, the TPS mechanism would be used. In other words, TPS mechanism is
being used to subvert the RFCTLARR Act! This is surely an abuse of the TPS
mechanism.
The TPS mechanism works in certain
situations and does not work in some other. It should not be seen as a coercive
mechanism of appropriating private lands for public purposes. On the other
hands private ownership of lands in Indian cities require some mechanism to
procure them at low costs for public goods. There has to be careful application
of the mechanism, which till now has been practiced as a mechanism of
negotiations and not coercion. It seems its wholesale promotion and adoption
may lead to more coercion than negotiations as PILs pending in the Gujarat High
Court for the SIRs indicate.
For full report on the TPS mechanism, see: https://www.wri.org/wri-citiesforall/publication/ahmedabad-town-planning-schemes-equitable-development-glass-half-full
No comments:
Post a Comment