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Fateh Lal Bapu is dead. His baithak near the Shreenathji temple in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, has also wound up. The younger generation, be it devotees or residents, have no clue of the bloody scenes this temple town witnessed in 1987. It all began when Ganesh Lal Mali, a former MP, escorted Keyur Bhusan of the Akhil Bharatiya Harijan Sevak Sangh for Darshan at the Vaishnav temple. Later, as they sat and sipped tea at Bapu’s baithak, a crowd swelled and demanded that Bhusan be handed over. His sin: being a lower caste, his entry had polluted the house of the Vaishnav Lord.

Bapu swore to protect his ‘guest’ with his life. While threatening to set his baithak on fire, a mob tore Mali’s clothes and nearly killed Bhusan. Bhagwati Prasad Deopura is among the few who witnessed the bloody caste battle. He rewinds 20 years and he spits venom, blaming ‘outsiders‘ for ‘disturbing the peace’ in Nathdwara. In other words, for making Dalits aware of their constitutional rights.

Deopura is among those who continue an anti-English campaign. Given his stiff resistance, English newspapers and literature are not allowed in Nathdwara. The Sahitya Mandal, of which Deopura is ‘Pradhan Mantri’ organizes an ‘Angrezi Hatao Diwas” (Ban English Day) every year. As far as the Dalits are concerned, Deopura, like most people here, would turn a blind eye to a ‘quiet entry’. But a ‘declared’ Dalit would have to face the consequences: “Joote parenge.” (They will be clobbered with shoes), says Deopura.

It is, therefore, all about silence. Sneak in quietly and even if you are noticed, no one will bother you; declare your identity and you are asking for trouble. The influx of ‘outsiders’ has blurred caste identities. With thousands thronging the temple daily, it is impossible to identify a Dalit from one who is not. The problem, however, is faced by the lower caste locals who cannot venture anywhere near the temple, for fear of inviting the wrath of the high castes. A vermilion-smeared Vaishnavite, for instance, has no qualms about hollering “Harijan!” to a sweeper if he wants a job done. Sip tea with an educated shopkeeper and he will ask you to throw the kulhad (earthen cup) on the street: “Harijan le jayega” (a Dalit will pick it up), he says brazenly. In the 80s, Dalits had to go as far as Udaipur for a haircut because the barbers in this temple town would not touch them.

It is against this mindset that there is a proposal of modernising the temple town. While bulldozers cannot invade minds, they are preparing to demolish the ancient structures of Nathdwara.That apart, expensive food courts will replace the saffron tea sellers selling a kulhad at Rs 3 and a Poha for Rs 5 at their makeshift shops. The crowds at Dilli Chowk will be pushed into marble-tiled waiting halls and the janata rooms will make way for donor cottages. The damage has begun. The Temple Board is on record stating that its properties have been demolished. However, agitations by residents have stalled the modernisation plan.

But before the year is out, Nathdwara will get a ‘facelift’. The estimated cost of the two-phased extension Plan is Rs 40 crore.The victims are sentiment, history and heritage. The Vallabh cottage has already been razed to the ground; the ancient Priyatam Pol is on its way out; the sanctity of the Giriraj Parvat Parikrama has been lost because a motorable road is running right through where devotees’ are supposed to tread bare feet. The musical fountains proposed in Lal Bag are all set to mute the sound of conch shells and temple bells.

Responding to artistes Mallika Sarabhai and Amit Ambalal, Intach has sought a heritage assessment of the buildings and conserving ancient wall paintings. A disgusted Sadashiv Shrotriya, who has penned several protests against the modernisation drive, says business interests have overtaken religious ones. It is in this context that he sees the backing off on the Dalit issue because increased footfalls to the temple mean more cash.

“Money overrules caste,” says Shrotriya. Gone are the days when priest-rulers like Goswami Goverdhan lal dared decision-makers to keep the railway line some kilometers off Nathdwara on the grounds that it would be a threat to the cows of the temple.

 Untouchability reigns supreme among the Vaishnavs in Nathdwara - both among those who live there and those who visit the place. The inner chambers of the temple are, however, out of bounds for those who have riot had a ‘holy dip’ or are not attired conventionally. An influential non-Vaishnavite can sneak in cohorts with the priests. But once there, he has to face the wall when those in the duty of the Lord pass by. Set your eyes on them and you have sinned. Like you have if you do not know your caste. Inside, when a priest clandestinely sought to know mine, he was relieved at my non-Dalit entity. “You have,” he pronounced “not sinned in the house of Vaishnav Gods.”

Riding high on the turnaround story of the country’s once-ailing train system, Railways Minister Lalu Prasad finds himself in a bind days before he presents his fourth budget. Should he further privatise the Railways and compromise his commitment to social justice or provide more jobs to those who belong to the lowest strata of the society?

The mammoth Indian Railways, which runs the world’s second-biggest network, employed 17 lakh people five years ago when it ran 11,000 trains. The train count has risen to about 15,000, but the number of employees has fallen to about 14 lakh since Lalu took over, said Shiv Gopal Mishra of the All India Railway Men Association (AIRF). He said the trend towards privatization threatened to destroy the system of accountability built up over decades.

An estimated 1.8 lakh positions, including 22,000 reserved category jobs, are vacant in the railway. The ministry has surrendered hundreds of other jobs. “When there are no recruitments, the commitment towards providing reservations becomes meaningless,” said Mohan Paswan of the All India SC&ST Railway Employees Association. The worst hits are the Valmikis, who occupy the lowest rung of the Hindu caste hierarchy; and are traditionally employed as safai karamcharis. Their number has shrunk by half to 22,000 since 1990. Ahead of the next budget, these are among issues that have been brought to the notice of Congress president Sonia Gandhi; said Ashok Kumar, the association’s general secretary.

“Some plans are good, but the entry of the private sector in core areas can lead to a serious agitation. Policymakers must desist from adventurism,” said M. Raghuviaiah of the National Federation of Indian Railway Men.

Two important Bills pending in Parliament seek to amend the Land Acquisition (LA) Act, and to give statutory authority for the first time to the rehabilitation and resettlement (RR) policy, itself revised on the basis of experience since the first RR policy of 2004. Will these twin Bills succeed in staving off further Nandigrams by securing greater justice for farmers and other displaced persons, while expediting at the same time the land acquisition of land for development projects?

The two Bills contain several far-reaching improvements. They broaden the definition of persons whose rights must be considered when land is being acquired, to include tenants, formal and informal, and to tribals with traditional rights over forest land. They require social impact assessments to be carried out according to procedures laid down in the new RR Act, which provides for consultation with the project affected families themselves, leading to the preparation of a transparent, publicly available RR plan and survey of affected families, within three months of a land acquisition notification. The LA Bill shortens the permissible time over which land acquisition procedures must take place. Disputes are removed from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, and entrusted to an ombudsman and special tribunals to expedite resolution.

The most significant departure, perhaps, is that the LA Bill narrows the definition of ‘public purpose’, to land acquired for strategic and infrastructure development purposes, while removing ‘companies’ as direct beneficiaries. Companies will now be expected to acquire land themselves, through negotiated purchases from willing sellers, although the Bill allows government to step in, if it is in the public interest, to acquire the land of any ‘hold-outs’ once a company has aggregated 70% of the land required. This land will be acquired at the same rate as that of the negotiated purchases, which will ensure that it receives the market rate. In such cases the livelihood and RR entitlements of the landless, including labourers, artisans and others, will have to be met by the company. Where the project authorities or company cannot provide employment to landless affected persons, they will have to protect their previ0us income for two years.

There are two important interconnected deficiencies in the Bills however. While , lip service is paid to the need to appraise projects by quantifying their socio-economic costs and benefits, no mechanism is included through which affected families, community organisations, and concerned citizens can do so, including an examination of any non -displacing or least displacing alternatives. Because acquired land is almost invariably under-priced as discussed below, there is a tendency by projects to acquire excess land and choose inappropriate locations. To prevent this, the Bills need to lay down a specific right to information, including the DPR, financing plan, and assumptions made on benefits and costs, as a check against the tendency to exaggerate the former and downplay the latter.

Second, the Act does not remove one of the main causes of resentment – the quantum of compensation. As discussed in a previous column, compensation is tied to the historical value of land that prevailed at the time of the initial notification of acquisition under Section 4 of the Act. Meanwhile, the price of land all around the project area shoots up.

The longer it takes for acquisition proceedings to be finalised (several years is common) the greater the difference between the acquisition price and the value of the land in the vicinity of the project when the owner of the land actually receives the compensation payment. Ironically, the latter continues to be referred to as an ‘award’ in the Act, although it is by then far below the market value. Thus in the POSCO project the price of land when the project was notified was about Rs 1 to 2 lakh per acre but has now gone up to more than Rs 6 lakh.

Land values in south Nagpur have quadrupled in the past two years because of the MIHAN or multimodal international hub at Nagpur project. Yet the 1500 affected farmers in the project area have the mortification of seeing their land being acquired at Rs 3.8 lakh per acre for irrigated land when a large block of land, albeit nearer the main road running outside the airport, was sold recently for Rs 2.55 crore an acre!

The logic of basing the acquisition price on the before project price is that a person whose land is being acquired should not be a beneficiary of the project investment. But he does not see why not - his land is as much a part of the project as anything else, and he asks why a much larger number of persons, many of them middleclass urban residents who were better off in the first place, should become rich while he stands to lose his livelihood, apart from being uprooted from his village? The compensation amount he receives no longer represents ‘market value’; it is a small fraction of it. To replace the same amount of land he would have to move miles away.

It was for this reason that an early version of the Bill defined market value as the replacement value of the asset. However; the final version of the Bill continues to assess market value on the basis of sale deeds and rates laid down for payment of stamp duty. These rates are out of date (by a factor of at least 10 for land around MIHAN) not only because of the time lag since notification, but more importantly because the market went dead long before the project area was notified. News of an impending project hangs in the air for many years, and no transactions take place in the affected area since no buyer wants to risk losing his land for the paltry compensation on offer.

As Naresh Saxsena of the National Advisory Council points out, land costs are a very small part of total project costs. Most projects can afford to be generous, and unless they are, the sense of injustice experienced by farmers in project after project is unlikely to go away. It would be a pity if the otherwise excellent changes in the two Acts were to be rendered ineffective in achieving one of their primary objectives, which is to expedite development by addressing an increasing cause of tension and violence.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s job is not exactly easy - and it shows in the way he has to resist all sorts of pressures while he strives to achieve what could be termed as the nearly impossible trinity of fiscal control, reasonable inflation and high economic growth. The government’s decision this week to increase the retail prices of petrol and diesel by Rs 2 and Re 1 per litre respectively is expected to reduce the revenue loss of public sector petroleum marketing companies by Rs 840 crore in the remaining six weeks of the current fiscal year. That is minuscule compared with the overall figure for the year, estimated at Rs 71,800 crore. The government has been time and again issuing bonds to these companies in its I-owe-you mode to effectively subsidise petroleum prices. Though originally intended to keep kerosene prices affordable for the poor, the wholesale subsidisation of petrol and diesel has made the whole thing a freebie even for affluent sections of society.

It is ironic that the Left parties supporting the UPA government continue to be a party to this reckless subsidisation, ostensibly in its attempts to keep prices under check for the underprivileged. Inflation based on wholesale prices is at around 4 per cent again, and given the undercurrent of a further price hike sometime in the future in view of Indian petroleum product prices being way below global levels, perhaps one cannot blame the Reserve Bank for holding its horses on cutting interest rates. That is not good news for industrialists, who cannot hope to get loans at much cheaper rates as long as there is an atmosphere of simmering inflation.

It is pertinent to note that under-recoveries from under-priced petroleum products would have been even higher at Rs 90,000 crore were it not for a rise in the rupee that makes imports cheaper, and also on account of more efficient refining margins. It is abundantly clear, therefore, that an endless supply of oil bonds is not the right way to tackle the mess.

Since the burden of under-pricing is only partly shared by the government, State-run oil companies face the danger of falling financially sick if the current condition is allowed to persist. The government needs to release in regular doses the pent-up costs of high global oil prices, and both the Left and industrialists must aid the process. For the Left, it is important to realise that a healthy fiscal situation is necessary to fund social sector programmes, and for industrialists, it is key to know that sustainable growth cannot take place in an atmosphere of fiscal profligacy.

Given that the next budget would head into an election year mood, perhaps it is too much to ask the government to bite the bullet on oil prices right away. An easier way could be for the UPA to take opposition parties into confidence and arrive at a quiet consensus with them on how to go about passing on the burden of high global oil prices to consumers. Casual subsidisation will only cause equally unmindful consumption behaviour. If the current hump is crossed somehow, even benign interest rates could become sustainable and the ‘India growth story’ would then be on firm ground.