On Wednesday, the Uttarakhand cabinet headed by Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami approved a revised land law with stricter provisions to regulate land sales. However, the new law is primarily meant to bar the sale of agricultural and horticultural land to outsiders except in Haridwar and Udham Singh Nagar districts.
The revised legislation, being tabled during the ongoing budget session before its adjournment on Feb 24, brings enormous changes in the land acquisition process. The mandatory affidavit is one of the key amendments that necessitate buyers to provide an affidavit before they purchase the land. The authority of the district magistrates to grant land purchase permissions is constrained, and more is supervised.
The second main highlight of the new law is the nullification of provisions introduced by the Trivendra Singh Rawat government in 2018. These were repealed provisions that had previously loosened constraints over sales of land and which many had feared was causing land to be acquired by non–residents for purposes of uncontrolled urbanisation and destruction of the environment.
Officials familiar with the process said that under the new legislation, all the land transactions would occur through a government-monitored online portal that would effectively check practically all the transactions to minimise the power of doing them illegally.
In line with the state government’s agenda to protect Uttarakhand agricultural resources from being bought by non-residents, the new land law seeks to check its indiscriminate sale. Preserving the ecological and cultural fabric of the state and enabling sustainable development was thus seen as a move.
With these amendments, the government seeks to achieve a golden mean, an equilibrium between agricultural land protection and economic growth, so as to preserve the country’s agricultural land for the benefit of local farmers and future generations.
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