This Land is Your Land

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.