SEZ, What is That?

It is a curious fact that till the countryside erupted over the SEZ question in 2006, the Indian Parliament had not even once discussed the subject. It had only figured as questions in both houses of Parliament. The tenor of the questions too was only about whether or how many projects had got the approvals necessary in order to begin operations. None of those queries had anything to say about land.

As we have said before, SEZ was made operational by the Exim policy of 2000. Finance minister Yashwant Sinha, in his budget speech for the year 2000–2001, stated the general policy. But SEZ did not figure either in the general discussion on budget or thereafter in any of the two houses of Parliament.

Industry too, after making the usual round of platitudes, more or less forgot the offer. There was a good reason for the forgetfulness.

SEZ, as conceptualized by the BJP party led National Democratic Alliance, was a scheme. Industry captains knew pretty well that schemes could be and were often reversed as soon as the regime changed at the centre. That did not mean that industrialists did not use those schemes or policies to make hay. The centre doles out subsidies to public sector oil marketing companies for the losses they suffer for having to sell kerosene and cooking gas at far less than their cost prices.

• Public purpose re-defined to include: strategic purposes vital to the state; public infrastructure, such as electricity, communication, mining, water supply, public facilities;

• Public purposes also includes cases of ‘persons’ (person includes any company or association or body of individuals, whether incorporated or not)–where land required for purposes useful for the general public and restricted to cases where at least 70% of total land already purchased;

• Part VII dealing with acquisition for companies omitted;

• Land remaining unutilised for 5 years to revert to appropriate government;

• 80% of the difference in consideration received over the acquisition cost to be shared amongst land owners in proportion to value of land acquired in case of transfer;

• Rate of compensation to be not less than floor price fixed by state government or average of higher prices paid in 50% of land sale cases during the last three years, whichever is higher;

• Conversion of land acquired to intended category of use to be taken into account in fixing market value;

• Full payment of compensation before taking possession;

• Entire exercise of land acquisition made time bound at every stage;

• Persons having tenancy rights included in the definition of ‘person interested’;

• Jurisdiction of civil courts barred; Land acquisition compensation disputes settlement authority proposed in each state, and also one for the centre;

• Solatium increased from 30% to 60% of market value; 75% for cases of urgency.

The rush for SEZs started after the announcement of the SEZ rules on 10 February 2006. There was no inkling of this dash when the late Mr Murasoli Maran, India's former Commerce Minister, announced the SEZ policy in April 2000. Thereafter too, there was hardly any haste among developers to build these zones even when the Exim Policy for 2002–7 increased the fiscal benefits for SEZ units, or when the Foreign Trade Policy for 2004–9 emphasized their importance. Commenting on SEZs, an editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) of 5 April 2003 mentioned: ‘The plan to set up SEZs was announced in 2000, in a bid to emulate China's spectacular success in boosting exports from its special economic zones. However, the implementation of the SEZ project has so far not been conspicuously successful. As Jaitley himself acknowledges, most of the projects are still bogged down, mainly by delays in land acquisition’.

Since 10 February 2006, the Board of Approval (BoA), which is empowered to approve SEZs, has met 13 times till 5 June 2007. On each occasion, it has examined proposals forwarded by different state governments, as well as those submitted to it directly by developers. Over the last one year, as SEZs slowly started moving into the eye of the storm, popular attention began zeroing in on the regional distribution of these zones.

09/07/2007

Sir,

As per discussions held with you, I am forwarding herewith the desired information relating to Singur project, for your ready reference and future course of action.

With warm regards

Yours faithfully

Sd/

Additional District Magistrate (G)

Hooghly

Encl: As stated above

The WBIDC as requiring body has submitted 13 (thirteen) proposals to the Collector Hooghly for acquisition of lands for ‘TATA Small Car Project’ at Singur. After scrutiny and examination the Collector, Hooghly started 13 LA cases comprising 5 mouzas viz., Beraberi, Singharbheri, Khaserbheri, Bajemelia and Gopal nagar under Singur Police Station having total area 997.11 acres.

1. 1) Individual notices for each plot of lands could not be issued. In the initial stage, serving of individual notices were made for a few cases. Afterward, due to mass agitation and gave law and order problem individual serving of notices could not be continued.

2. However general notices in the local panchayats, important government offices and other conspicuous places were published. Publication of notices were also made through local and Kolkata based English and Bengali newspapers and also through loudspeakers.

3. The price of land was arrived at as per GO No. 1705-LA-3M-07/06 dated kolkata the 6 June 2006.

4. Exact price for the land parcel that the district administration acquired from 13 no. of LA cases is Rs 119.5266 crore.

5. The requiring body WBIDC submitted proposal from 13 LA cases and after scrutiny Govt of West Bengal given administration approval for each case. Afterward, due to mass agitation and gave law and order problem individual serving of notices could not be continued.

6. […]

How do developers go about the task of setting up SEZs? Before looking at the process, it will probably be wiser to understand what a ‘developer’ implies in SEZ parlance. According to Section 2 of the SEZ Act of 2005, a ‘developer’ is a person, or a State Government, holding an approval letter from the Central Government for establishing an SEZ. A particular SEZ might have more than one developer if one single entity is not found possessing the minimum stretch of contiguous land required for building the zone. All such entities then become ‘co-developers’.

A simple way of understanding the rules of the game to be followed by developers would be to look at the details that they need to submit to the authorities for building zones. Compared with the general perception, the paperwork involved is not excessively long or tedious. The form ‘A’ in which an applicant is required to apply for setting up zones is just a three-page document with a refreshingly simple attitude. This has been reproduced in Annexure 1. Apart from the mandatory but somewhat perfunctory information on the developer (name, address, nature of the company, etc.), an interesting query in the form is the distance of the proposed zone from the nearest sea, road, air or railhead. One can sense that the authorities are keen to understand the kind of links the zone can grow given the gateways around it.

TO BE ANSWERED ON 22.08.2003 FUNCTIONING OF SEZS

435. AVSM BRIG (retd) KAM AKHYA PRASAD SINGH DEO PARSURAM MAJHI

Will the Minister of Commerce and industry be pleased to state:-

1. (a) The details of proposals for setting up special economic zones in respect of which approval has been given by the union government the basis of proposals received from different state governments\promoters, state wise and location wise;

2. (b) The date on which approval has been given to each proposal, state wise;

3. (c) The reasons for non-functioning of special economic zones particularly at Paradeep and at Gopalpur in Orissa;

4. (d) The date by which these special economic zones are likely to become functional; and

5. (e) The details of the steps being taken to expedite the functioning of these special economic zones at the earliest.

Although interest in indoor air pollution seems relatively recent, our earliest evidence of air pollutants often comes from indoor environments, such as dwellings filled with smoke and associated pollutants from poorly ventilated fires. When cities developed, these also became associated with pollution problems. The development of air pollution over the last 700–800 years seems to follow consistent patterns. Air pollution has often been related to the history of fuel use and the perceptible change in air pollution that arises from the fuels. Increasing energy demands and the adoption of new fuels (sequentially: coal, petrol, diesel) have caused air pollution problems. Mieck (1990) has argued that the numerous pollution decrees from the Middle Ages are essentially a response to single sources of what he terms pollution artisanale. These were usually just one particular type of pollution and distinct from the later and broader pollution industrielle that characterised an industrialising world.

Air pollution has often been visible as smoke, photochemical smog and diesel smoke. The concentration of air pollutants from a given source, such as coal, seems to increase for a long period and undergo a decrease due to declining emission strength. The pollution from one source is often replaced by another (e.g. coal smoke by petrol-derived pollution).The patterns of changing air pollution, although similar from one country to another, can take place over very different timescales.

As this book's subtitle indicates, it will examine many of the main twentieth-century global forces, which often clashed with one another. This work also attempts to present different, also often conflicting, viewpoints about these forces. And the question mark in the book's title (An Age of Progress?) suggests that contending judgments exist as to whether the century was one of overall progress. Thus, the following pages are more of an analysis and assessment of the century than an introduction to it, and are intended for students or general readers who already possess a basic knowledge of it. A rough draft of this manuscript was used in an advanced team-taught undergraduate seminar in the winter of 2007, and it stimulated much healthy debate.

As with any work dealing with twentieth-century global history, this work is limited and selective. It deals with some, but not all, of the important trends of the century. Within these trends, it concentrates more on developments within the more industrialized world of western Europe, the United States, and Russia/USSR than on those in the less industrially developed parts of the world.

There are two reasons for the relative neglect of areas outside of the industrialized West and Russia. First, except for Russian history, which I have taught and written about for many years, my knowledge of non-Western countries is simply too limited to do more than mention some ways that my main trends interacted with them.

The long-term impact of scientific-technological developments on twentieth-century life was enormous. These developments were crucial, for example, in greatly increasing people's life expectancy (see below) and the global population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 1999, an increase that would have major environmental consequences (see Chapter 6).

The line between technology and science, especially applied sciences such as aeronautics, agronomy, electronics, engineering, medicine, and metallurgy, is sometimes difficult to discern. For understanding twentieth-century history, however, what is most essential is to comprehend the areas of human life that were most affected by their combined impact. In general, science deals more with principles and theories, whereas technology is concerned with techniques, tools, instruments, machines, and other products that help humans to accomplish various tasks. Science itself was often poorly understood and took on significance for most people only when it led to technological developments like advancements in medical treatment or sending men to the moon. In the early twentieth century physicists like Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Werner Heisenberg, Hans Bethe, and Enrico Fermi participated in a golden age for their science. And people heard of some of their new terms such as Quantum Mechanics, the Theory of Relativity, and the Uncertainty Principal, but few non-scientists really understood their meaning.

Ozone is the triatomic form of oxygen. It is a colourless gas that acts as a highly reactive oxidising agent. It is the primary oxidising irritant in photochemical smog. On the other hand, ozone is used to deodorise air, purify water and treat industrial wastes. Ozone is a strong absorber of ultraviolet radiation. Ozone can be both good and bad: bad to breathe near the surface in the troposphere, but good to shield from ultraviolet (uv) radiation in the stratosphere.

One of the most important properties of ozone is its ability to absorb ultraviolet radiation (discovered by Hartley 1880). The earth is surrounded by a thin layer of ozone that is sufficient to screen us from the ultraviolet radiation from the sun that would otherwise reach the surface, where it would be capable of breaking bonds in biologically important compounds such as DNA (e.g. Björn 2007). The thin layer of ozone in the stratosphere is only about one part in a million of the total molecules that make up our atmosphere. If the entire layer were reduced to surface pressure, it would be only 3 millimetres in thickness. Figure 5.1shows how the air temperature and ozone concentration changes within the troposphere and the stratosphere.

Temperature decreases throughout the region called the troposphere. Temperature is then constant or slowly increasing, forming a permanent inversion layer called the stratosphere.

Wars, assassinations, atrocities—these words appeared often in the twentieth century. No earlier century had witnessed as much killing. Population increases provided more people to kill; technological developments provided more efficient means to do so; and expanding media coverage informed more people about such killings and horrors as the century proceeded.

History books, however, are better at providing mind-numbing statistics regarding all this killing than they are at conveying much feeling for the millions of individual tragedies caused by it. The British novelist Ian McEwan hinted at this problem when he wrote about one of his characters:

Some feeling for all these tragedies is also sometimes conveyed by firsthand accounts. A few early ones are provided here, and readers can only attempt to imagine some of the other millions of tragedies which lie behind the gruesome statistics of the remainder of the century.

Imperialism

Imperialism has existed for many centuries and is defined in different ways. Some scholars have related it directly to their definition of empire. For our consideration here, however, which lies mainly with the twentieth century, it seems best to define it as a country's extension of rule or authority by force or the threat of its use over a foreign territory. Such a simple definition sidesteps the very complex arguments among scholars about formal and informal empires and what constitutes an empire. Such debates need not bog us down here.

The imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had many unique features. The desire for new markets to absorb the increasing capitalist productive capacity and to help overcome the global depression of 1873 to 1896, along with technological advances in shipping, communications, and military capacities, stimulated a new outburst of imperialism. British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said in 1895, “We must be prepared to take the requisite measures to open new markets for ourselves among the half-civilized or uncivilized nations of the globe.” In 1898, the year of the U.S. annexation of Hawaii and of the Spanish–American War, political orator and soon-to-be senator from Indiana, Albert Beveridge, expressed a similar sentiment:

Closely connected to the twentieth century's changes in science, technology, economics, and politics have been those to the environment. One historian wrote that “the human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth. In time, I think, this will appear as the most important aspect of twentieth-century history, more so than World War II, the communist enterprise, the rise of mass literacy, the spread of democracy, or the growing emancipation of women.”

In his book The Coming Anarchy (2000), Robert Kaplan declared that “it is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts—will be the core foreignpolicy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.”

Two major and interconnected factors, both fuelled by scientific and technological developments, were responsible for the twentieth century's unprecedented environmental changes and their importance by century's end: population growth and economic activities, especially industrialization and increased consumption. The explosion of twentieth century consumption (see Chapter 3) not only placed increasing demands on scare resources to produce more goods, but also increased pollution in the process of producing and disposing of worn out or obsolescent products.