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Experts slam Govt.’s new policy on people displaced by projects
Specialists have slammed the Government’s new policy for resettling those displaced by development projects.
It is disturbing that the policy—produced by the National Agency for Public Private Partnership (NAPPP) under the Finance Ministry—makes the Valuation Department the final arbiter for deciding compensation payments, say Ruwani Jayawardene and Sam Pillai, resettlement experts who helped draft the country’s first National Involuntary Resettlement Policy (NIRP) in 2001.
“Worse still is the assumption that it will be business as usual for acquiring land,” they observe. The Ministry of Lands now widely invokes a proviso under Section 38(a) of the Land Acquisition Act, which allows for immediate possession of land on grounds of “any urgency” without consultation with affected people. Thousands of people are helpless in the face of Section 38(a) notices.
“Even then, there are over fifty steps in the process, which could take up to three years to complete,” Dr Jayawardene told the Sunday Times. “The Divisional Secretaries responsible for this work need assistance of land surveyors to establish titles, which is another major reason for delays. Most people do not have clear land titles.”
The NAPPP’s Resettlement Policy Framework (RPF) is a long-winded, mostly cut-and-paste mishmash of policy, project development and financing “with guidelines and checklists thrown in for good measure”, she said.
The agency is structured as an independent institution with legal, administrative and financial powers to select and oversee implementation of projects based on public-private partnership and to provide guidance to ministries and other Government institutions in this regard.
But the RPF has outdated references to World Bank policy and resettlement, the experts say, asking why the guidelines of other multilateral development banks were not considered. A sum of US$ 2.5 million is set aside to formulate PPP policy, procurement and communications.
“While the need for improving the legal and institutional framework is recognised, no specific mention is made of the importance of addressing the serious challenges in land acquisition for many of the projects,” Mr. Pillai said.
The RPF claims to be consistent with the Land Acquisition Act (1950), the National Involuntary Resettlement Policy (2001) and the World Bank Operational Procedures. Reference is made to the World Bank’s O.P. 4.12 on involuntary resettlement. But this has since been superseded by the Environmental and Safeguards Framework (ESF) of 2016, operational since October 2018, under which responsibility for addressing social impacts is delegated to individual countries.
“There is no need to include World Bank provisions since Sri Lanka’s NIRP, properly incorporated into law, meets or even exceeds donor safeguard provisions,” Mr Pillai continued. “Yet again, a combination of uninformed and bankrupt politicians and bureaucrats turn the wheels of outdated thinking out of sync with the people and the development needs of the day.”
The experts ask whether the authors of the RPF had “even glanced” at India’s Bill on Land Acquisition and Resettlement or, “due to ignorance and lack of political will concluded it is best to cobble together yet another pointless document without getting to the core of the problem—the Land Acquisition Act of 1950.”
“It would be comical, if it were not real, that the Government of Sri Lanka clings on to a colonial law which was marginally amended in the last century and attempts to present itself as a progressive futuristic planning machine,” Dr Jayewardene said.