Essayer OR - Gratuit
This Land is Your Land
Outlook
|September 26, 2016
Ten lakh acres—that’s 4,000 sq km, the size of Trinidad and Tobago —are lying idle with central PSUs. How can India benefit?
-

If the figures are fed into a regular calculator, it will throw up an error message. The acres and acres of land lying idle and locked up for decades in industrial units, mostly public sector and, at times, private, add up to the size of a small country. So far no attempt has been made to evaluate its real worth. Now, the central government has finally embarked on a mammoth exercise: creating a data bank for an estimated 10 lakh acres of surplus land held by 298 central public sector enterprises (CPSEs), including many closed units, spread across India. Even putting a bare minimum rate of Rs 25 lakh for an acre (which is absurdly low for cities like Mumbai or Bangalore), the worth of the government’s surplus landholding tots up over Rs 2.5 lakh crore, more than the notional loss in the 2G scam—or the famed hidden treasure of the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram.
The idea is to take stock of surplus and underutilised land and other CPSE assets and gradually unlock it for optimal use— at least by government entities in need of land. It’s a travesty, for instance, that land worth thousands of crores lies idle, often in city centres, when there is no space for new educational institutions, social infrastructure projects like health facilities, affordable housing, urban forestry, or even roads. For physical sites, projects now have to scrounge around in rural swathes bey ond city limits. Add to this the voracious appetite for land from the private sector for housing, commercial and industrial ventures. The unlocking of the CPSE treasure chest could become a big boon for the housing sector, which is reeling under a severe land shortage in urban centres.
Cette histoire est tirée de l'édition September 26, 2016 de Outlook.
Abonnez-vous à Magzter GOLD pour accéder à des milliers d'histoires premium sélectionnées et à plus de 9 000 magazines et journaux.
Déjà abonné ? Se connecter
PLUS D'HISTOIRES DE Outlook
Outlook
Free the Word
Book bans are about fear, control and the desperate need to manage public imagination
7 mins
July 11, 2025

Outlook
Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye to Kya Hai
Guru Dutt, whose birth centenary falls this July, created cinematic masterpieces amid the fog of his own uncertainty
6 mins
July 11, 2025

Outlook
When the Words Stop
Our worst algorithms have come home to haunt us. The nightmare is no longer something we dream up. It is dreamt on our behalf
16 mins
July 11, 2025

Outlook
Rath Jatra
Is Mamata Banerjee's embrace of Lord Jagannath the latest counter to the BJP's Ram-centric politics?
5 mins
July 11, 2025
Outlook
Zan, Zindagi, Azadi
As missiles fall silent—for now—it's time to explore whether the heart of the Iran-Israel conflict lies in a deeper battle over culture and values
3 mins
July 11, 2025

Outlook
The She Voter
Political parties in Bihar are looking to woo women voters—who constitute almost half of the vote bank—ahead of the state Assembly election
7 mins
July 11, 2025

Outlook
Veil, Women and Warfare
Policies—whether in the West or in the Muslim world—are imposed on women, not developed with them or for them. How they dress becomes shorthand for community honour, nationalism or piety
8 mins
July 11, 2025

Outlook
Forever Hotel
This novel is a flawed, luminous, maximalist love letter to Kolkata’s layered soul
4 mins
July 11, 2025

Outlook
Regimentation
The US has zero moral authority to want to tell the Tehran regime to behave itself or be nice to its own people
5 mins
July 11, 2025
Outlook
The Way We War
Modern warfare is a shape-shifting entity and the information explosion has expanded the battlespace far beyond the battlefield
5 mins
July 11, 2025