Gandhinagar

Claiming that the government had protected the farmers’ interests, Union Rural Development minister Chaudhary Birender Singh today said the criticism of the ordinance on land acquisition law amendment was only political.

“Some of the concerns about the ordinance are political and I am not bothered about them,” Singh said, talking to PTI here on the sidelines of Pravasi Bhartiya Divas program.

When pointed out that some reputed developmental economists had criticised the government’s decision to take the ordinance route, he said, “Economists too are not independent, they can be biased in certain ways.”

The ordinance aims at expediting the acquisition for industrial projects. According to some reports, Singh himself was unhappy with the move, but he denied that.

“We have protected the farmers’ interests to the best of our ability. No compensation clause was touched, no rehabilitation clause was touched and no resettlement clause was touched,” he said.

The objective was to do away with certain provisions of the Land Acquisition Act such as requirement of social impact assessment or the consent of 80 per cent of the farmers, which restricted the industrial growth, he said.

“Land acquisition cannot be stopped for all the time to come. That is not possible. The way the act was enacted (during the UPA regime), you could see that there were 60 mistakes and those mistakes were very vital,” he added.

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