Land governance & Infrastructure Development: Challenges in the Perspective of Land Acquisition and Resettlement Addressing Social Safeguards

Mayen Uddin Tazim

Growing development planning in recent decades in the developing countries requires more lands for the construction of infrastructures under the different development projects with the Technical Assistance receiving from World Bank, ADB and JICA. Infrastructure development is significantly required for the improvement of communication, urbanization and industrialization which have a multiple impacts on promoting social and economic mobilization in case of improving supplying chain management, importing-exporting agricultural products and commodities; in the long run, it will also create significant changes in the daily lives of rural and urban citizens. Due to rapid urbanization and industrialization, acquisition of private lands by the government for the development of infrastructures is a common scenario globally in which significant policy implications are incurred while imposing state’s laws and regulations on the land owners. Overpopulation dealing with the urbanization creates scarcity of lands that keeps tremendous pressure on the land ownership pattern in result lands become significantly valuable asset in the Asia and south Asia like Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan. It is not only a means of livelihood, it also shows a symbol of social and political empowerment. However, land ownership in most cases is obtained by inborn or inherited which is always insufficient in nature as the term of ‘Land Acquisition’ sometimes indicates a Threatening and Frightening to the landowners. The prime objective of the article is to outline the policy implications of the land acquisition on the people’s livings due to imposing the laws and regulations of the state for implementing development projects in which Technical Assistance of the donors are questioned and challenged.

Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018

Document type:Land governance & Infrastructure Development: Challenges in the Perspective of Land Acquisition and Resettlement Addressing Social Safeguards (82 kB - pdf)