In the latter case, farmers, whose land needs to be acquired for construction of the highway, have launched an agitation and only time will tell when Mayavati's dream project will be completed. Both events have once again brought to the fore the issue of whether owners of agricultural land can be forced to give up their land on the principle of ‘eminent domain'. All densely populated developing countries have to confront this issue because it is a ‘stylized' fact of development that people have to move out of agriculture to the industrial and services sectors. The inevitability of this process is not difficult to explain. It is well-known that individual demands for various products do not grow proportionately as per capita incomes rise. In particular, we spend a smaller fraction of our incomes on food and other agricultural products as we grow richer — we buy more expensive cars, laptops, bigger houses. Since a sector should only produce what it can sell, the relative size of agriculture, and hence the population which it can support, must shrink. Read the full report here.
Source: by Bhaskar Dutta, The Telegraph, Kolkata.
