LAND ACQUISITION FOR NEW DEVELOPMENTS IS NEITHER NECESSARY NOR HELPFUL - My opinion in Deccan Herald today to accompany the full-page-plus coverage of land pooling as an alternative to reconstitution across the country. --- Do we need new townships? The last set of big layouts of the Bangalore Development Authority are fairly empty even years after their 'completion'. Moreover, the 720+ square kilometers within GBA limits is quite flat. One can climb up to the roof of any tall building in the city and look around; there is still plenty of scope for raising the average height of buildings. Doing that instead would limit the sprawl and preserve the countryside. Consolidation of plots and better urban design can make many neighbourhoods far more livable even with higher densities - there is firm agreement on this among urban planners. Many gated communities have better amenities and comfort than the the layouts around them, even though the density is higher within the gates. That should tell us that it's possible to do a lot more in the existing city. A standard response to this from government is that even if we increased the capacity within the current boundaries of the city, we will still need more space outside the city since the growth in the population seems endless. Perhaps, but that establishes a sequence. We should first tackle the existing city, and then think about expansion. And when we do get there, the right question to ask is if land acquisition is necessary. Why not simply rezone the lands in a proposed new area, and let the existing landowners themselves benefit from any development that happens there? Why dispossess and displace them? This is what many owners of the properties in the areas around the city are demanding. There are examples of this kind of redevelopment - typically called land pooling and reconstitution - from around the country, The most famous example is the Ahmedabad ring road, which was built without land acquisition, but there are also examples from Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and other places. When current landowners become stakeholders in the future, they cooperate with the government far more readily. When they sense that they are being dispossessed so that the benefits can be transferred to someone else, they naturally oppose such development. And that has only slowed things down - the Peripheral Ring Road is yet to get off the ground, more than 20 years after its launch. It is grotesque for the government to tell a landowner that development rights on his land are minimal as long as he owns it, but that much more construction will be permitted once it has been acquired forcibly! That is an arbitrage scheme for public officials and politicians, not a development plan for the people. Why do we then do this? By far the biggest reason is that although land pooling among existing owners is cheaper and faster, it's also more work for the authorities. Officials must go to owners, discuss and collaborate with them, consider various possibilities, and then put together something that works well for a lot of people. Development authorities should be doing this, but they have instead tried to create outcomes through authority and the law. They have also sought to profit from new layouts and townships, by keeping a portion of the acquired lands for themselves and selling those at higher prices later, often to 'chosen' buyers. These stances have destroyed public trust in the institutions.