Articles by Usha Ramanathan

The displaced and their advocates have been campaigning for a law that will limit the coercive power of the State in taking over land. The Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2011 adopts some of the language and concerns from the sites of conflict. But by beginning with the premise that acquisition is inevitable and that industrialisation, urbanisation and infrastructure will have lexical priority, the LARR Bill 2011 may have gained few friends among those whom involuntary acquisition has displaced, and those for whom rehabilitation has been about promises that have seldom been kept.

India's unique identification number project has been sold on the promise that it will make every citizen, the poor in particular, visible to the State. But the UID project raises crucial issues relating to profiling, tracking and surveillance, and it may well facilitate a dramatic change in the relationship between the State and the people. The Unique Identification Authority of India has not acknowledged these concerns so far. And now, nowhere in the proposed draft bill that it has prepared have these issues been addressed nor have clauses been drafted to prevent abuse of information that will be collected by the agency. With so many questions on the project - regarding biometrics, security and privacy - yet to be answered, it is far from time for parliamentary approval. As has been observed, the Constitution is expected to provide the citizen with dignity and privacy; but these are missing in the UID project.

"Cleaning up" the city usually employs demolition as an effective tool to clear the lands and disperse the poor. But for decades, the violence of demolition was tempered by a policy of resettlement which, even when partially and imperfectly implemented, gave demolition a veneer of legitimacy. But the notion of housing for the urban poor has acquired an "illegality" in the last five years. The judiciary has been a significant contributor to this evolving jurisprudence on shelter, housing and the urban poor. The constitutionality that ensured every citizen the fundamental rights of livelihood, housing and shelter has now been revised, reinvented and supplanted by a legality that sees the urban poor as encroachers and a threat to civic existence.

Industrial risk was a dormant concern till it precipitated into the Bhopal Gas Disaster in December 1984. The siting of industrial risk, and its exiling, have been part of law, policy and practice over the 20 years since Bhopal. There is, however, an incoherence in the development of law and policy. The anxiety about risk and hazard exists, but legal imagination has not been able to cope with the consequences of either leaving risk where it is, or exiling it. The courts do not possess the equipment needed to work out the reorganisation of spaces to minimise, or outlaw, risk. Yet, when the question of risk and hazard is taken to the court, the judiciary cannot turn away. It has sometimes refused to be definitive, and sometimes shown a tolerance of risk, asking of persons resident around risk to become superior risk bearers.