How the whole country is being gobbled up by so-called ‘developers’

Chances are you’re up for grabs. The whole country is up for grabs. The National Media Centre (NMC), the housing society in Haryana where i live, isn’t an exception.

What’s all this grabbing that’s going around with a fervency worse than a dengue epidemic? What’s being grabbed? Gold chains? Handbags? Sensitive parts of our anatomy? Worse. What’s being grabbed is land. All over the country, Operation Landgrab is on with a vengeance, and no one is safe. The NMC isn’t. Two acres of the society’s land has been grabbed, with zero compensation. The original grabbers were the local authorities. Of course they didn’t use the word ‘grabbing’; they used the word ‘acquisition’. For the purposes of making the grabbed – sorry, acquisitioned – land into an eco-friendly green belt. The NMC pointed that the land in question already was an eco-friendly green belt.

Never mind, said the authorities, and acquisitioned it anyway. And promptly handed it over to a private ‘developer’ who now plans to pave the whole thing over and convert it into a seven-lane ‘service lane’. Whom will this mammoth ‘service lane’ service? Will it service the general public interest? It will do better than that. It will service the interest of a great big mall that is being built in the area. Who’s building this mall? Surprise, surprise. It’s the same good folks who want to build the service lane.

To find out how and why all this land is being grabbed all over the country, JV went to interview the Landgrabber-in-Chief of the Daily Landgrabbers’ Federation.

JV: Why is all this land being grabbed, all over the place?

L-in-C: Why is land being grabbed? What a dumb question. Tell me, what’s the most priceless commodity in the world today?

JV: Oil? Gold? Platinum? Diamonds?

L-in-C: Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again. The most priceless commo-dity in the world today – and particularly in India – is land. And do you know why that is? Because they stopped making any more new land over 4.5 billion years ago when the Earth was formed. But when they stopped making land, they didn’t stop making people. What happens when there are more, and more, and then even more, people on the same amount of land? Demand for land outstrips the supply of land and makes land the most priceless commodity in the world.

JV: That’s all very well about demand and supply. But since there is too little land and too many people – particularly in India – shouldn’t whatever land there is be used in the interests of the people as a whole, in the interests of the public?

L-in-C: People-sheeple, public-wublic. Don’t you know that possession is nine points of the law? Well, in India, where land is concerned, dis-possession is nine points of the law. And who cares about the other one point, anyway?

JV: But after you’ve dispossessed all the people of all the land and there’s no more land for people to be dispossessed of, what will you do then?

L-in-C: Hmm. Good question. But there’s land under the sea. If we can get someone to part the sea, we can grab the land under the water. There’s an Israeli chap called Moses or something who’s said to have done that with the Red Sea a while ago. And the sea apart, there’s always outer space. The Moon’s got land to grab. So do Mars, Venus, the Milky Way…

JV: Good heavens. Is there no end to your landgrabbing greed?

L-in-C: Heaven? Hey, that’s a great idea! How come i never thought of it? Do you think Heaven comes leasehold or freehold? In either case, it must be up for grabs, right?