Terming land acquisition as one of the ‘difficult acts’ in India, NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Arvind Panagariya on Saturday said it can easily take up to 5 years for acquiring land for a large project including building of cities.
Availability of land is a big challenge and has become a big debate in the country, he said at a conference here on sustainable and inclusive urbanisation. “If you want to build new cities, you need land and also large spaces are required for businesses to flourish and for that you need spaces within the existing cities,” he said.
“By all estimates that I have seen, it will easily take about up to 5 years for any acquisition of land to construct a city or something like that. That I am assuming that every step goes in smooth process without any challenges from NGOs, either judicial one or any kind of protest. So procedurally, it is a difficult Act,” Panagariya said. The horizontal space is also scarce, he said, adding that one way to overcome this space problem is to construct vertically but there are issues with that as well.
He said Indian cities have chosen a policy of low floor space index (FSI) and which have resulted in high rentals.