RAILWAY LAND POLICY & URBAN MARGINALISATION

For metro -urban clusters in India, the habitation of poor masses, needs a spatial conceptualisation that discards the conventional urban markings of wards. For that it needs to pay close attention to the railway stations and tracks, sewage network, flyovers, dumping grounds, and other ubiquitous locations, patches of territory that slums, squatters and homeless can claim as their own (GoNCTD 2015; Ghosh 2019).

Railway stations & railway lines were a conventional asylum for the rural migrants in metro cities . Train stations in their various forms & appearances play an important  role as “non-places” that are anomalous and sporadic entities within the urban landscape, acquiring a deep meaning for “non-people,” those having no visibility and social role (Carminucci 2011). 

The slums on railway land mostly fall in the non-notified category according to the provisions of the Census of India, and, therefore, the dwellers are very often termed as encroachers (GoI 2015; Saiz 2015; Borgohain 2021). 

These “illegal” urban poor , residing on railways’ territory, have no entry in the institutionalized process of participation (for example, bhagidari in Delhi) in the governance of Indian cities (Ghosh 2019), and are very easy to dispossess.

Indian Railways is believed to be the largest single landowner in the country (IRICE 2021), using its land for different activities, some of which are not directly associated with the actual functioning of the railways. 

By 2018, Indian Railways owned nearly 4.77 lakh hectares of land, out of which the operational and allied usages covered approximately 3.66 lakh hectares, followed by vacant land, plantation/cultivation, other usages like land given to Rail Land Development Authority, Container Corporation of India, and Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India, commercial licensing and encroachments, accounting for 51,550 hectares, 45,650 hectares, 9,830 hectares, 3,910 hectares, and 844 hectares of land, respectively (IRICE 2021). 

Slums, squatters and other forms of unauthorised occupancies labelled as encroachments account for nearly 0.20% of the entire land, owned by the railways. Even though, statistically, the amount of encroached land is negligible, economically they are of great importance.  

This prevailing rent gap on railway land has attracted substantial attention from different governments, city development authorities as well as private developers, in the recent past. 

Under the label of rail land development ventures, land value capturing programmes, urban regeneration, station development and most recently transit-oriented development (TOD), these unauthorised occupancies on railway land have largely fallen under the mercy of bulldozers.

Railway stations offer opportunities to earn bread & butter to a wide variety of homeless and shanty dwellers, by cleaning the station, selling various items to passengers, rag picking doing odd jobs such as shining shoes and lifting loads & even begging due to high traffic of people.

The stations also provide free public utilities like toilet, water facilities and open living space (Mitra et al 2015). Thus, eviction as well as changes in structural & functional characteristics of station area, makes the aspirations of social and economic justice a distant reality. Consequently, the organic relation between people & space seems to be destroyed by deliberate interventions of both public and private players (Banerjee Guha 2010). 

One way of engaging constructively with the present developmental paradigm is to think about its effects, positive or negative, and searching for ways to mitigate the latter (Hasan 2018).

Proximity to transit hubs and land value have always been found to have a positive correlation with each other. Conventional theory on urban land rent vividly correlates transport infrastructure, its proximity effect and investments with land values (Alonso 1964).

Research indicates that the majority of the transit-oriented development (TOD) undertakings are implemented against some social cost through displacing the urban poor from station neighbourhoods and attracting affluent urbanites, who tend to replace residential opportunities for the urban poor (Kahn 2007; Dawkins and Moeckel 2016; Dong 2017; Haque and Sharna 2020). 

The restructuring is often mapped out to pull the middle- and higher-income urbanites, potentially to generate higher property tax revenues, capture the value of land more intensively and thus has become a marketing tool for cities to compete on a global scale for capital investments (Knowles et al 2020). 

Goals of social sustainability are thus dominated by the aspirations of economic profitability in a neo-liberal politico-economic environment (Grengs 2005; Rayle 2015).

The evidences indicate that, areas around transit nodes in a TOD neighbourhood are largely devoted to erecting mega commercial structures, restaurants, office space and other establishments of elite interest (Debrezion et al 2007; Renne et al 2016; Dong 2017).

Thus capitalisation of accessibility effect, into land and property values, may cause deportation of low income or impoverished residents of railway stations and their neighbourhoods, leading to full-fledged gentrification (Dawkins and Moeckel 2016).

Therefore, the provision of low-cost social housing and other associated structures should be a broader policy goal of TOD endeavours (Chava et al 2018), as in India, railway stations & their adjacent land have served as reference landscapes for urban marginalisation. 

Among 60 smart cities, identified under the Smart City Mission by 2016, 41 cities proposed land-use-transportation integration-based development alternatives for them; 21 out of the 41 cities are found to have strong TOD proposals and therefore are chosen for Value Capture Finance (VCF) in TOD (NIUA and FCO 2017).

VCF is an approach to finance public infrastructures by capturing the incremental value of private land and real estate through investments in public infrastructure. It operates under the supposition that investment in public infrastructure potentially brings about augmented valuation of adjacent private and public lands.

However, in urban India, the existing railway land, which is not under its operational usage, is yielding very low value for the railway authorities, because a substantial portion of the land is encroached by the urban poor.

Indian Railways categorises encroachments into two major groups, such as soft encroachments, denoting practices like throwing garbage or cattle rearing  in railways land, etc, & hard encroach­ments involves  construction of any permanent or temporary structure on the railway land for economic or residential purpose and other such activities (IRICE 2021: 74). 

Railways evict the encroachers through two legislations 1) the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1971 (PPE Act) & 2) the Railway Act, 1989. Where the soft encroachments can be evicted without implementing the PPE Act, actions against hard encroachments do require the PPE Act to be implemented. Additionally, according to Section 147 of the 1989 Act railways can punish any person for entering upon or into any part of the railway property without lawful authority (IRICE 2021).

The crime &  poverty associated with the transit stations can reduce the land values, & investment in transit alone is not expected to revitalise railway lands that are otherwise unattractive to the investors.

Since TOD undertakings very often require expenditures other than transit, including landscaping to enhance the site attractiveness, slums and shanties, which are frequently termed as encroachments and eyesores on railway lands, along with the homeless station dwellers, largely become susceptible to evictions.

Reproduction of urban space under this configuration intrinsically portrays the contradictions of economic-cum-social globalisation at local and neighbourhood scale, revealing a deep structural variance in which modernity and post- modernity are marked with evanescence and chaotic flux (Banerjee Guha 2010).

Railway station regions have a complex society which is dedicated to motion; so they offer a chance to carry out urban development & spatial cohesion policies as well as to resolve old tensions caused by the sharing of physical space, and by ghettoisation phenomena which have been produced at local scale, between rail infrastructure and the surrounding urban context. (Conticelli and Tondelli 2011: 47)

The TOD in western perspective is  based on the non affordability of car by poor  people but in India, it is about those who used to struggle daily to afford bread and butter.

Nearly 17.4% (as Census of India, 2011 records) of the total urban population of India, lives in slums and a substantial proportion of the slums are located on railway lands. 

VCF mechanisms are largely grounded on market-driven developments in station sites that may potentially fuel residential and commercial gentrification. Loss of a  railway station as an asylum for marginalised people, the attrition of community networks may produce some social & psychological disadvantages to station users. 

 Indian Railways do not have any rehabilitation policy for unauthorised slum dwellers and homeless people, and it considers rehabilitation a state subject. However, there are some exceptions where the railways have shared the cost of rehabilitation with the state/union territory. 

Delhi government’s Resettlement & Rehabilitation Policy states that the cost of relocation of any slum on existing railway land, located within the jurisdiction of National Capital Territory of Delhi, prior to 1998, is to be carried out by the Indian Railways (Das 2014). 

The Union Cabinet approved the revised policy for railway land, which will allow leasing of such land for cargo use for longer periods at lower costs. As per the new policy, the land can be now leased for cargo-related activities for up to 35 years (as against five years earlier) at 1.5% of market value of land per annum, down from 6% earlier. It has no mention of any rehabilitation policy 

Kerala state govt is planning for a semi high-speed rail project called as SilverLine  project. Kerala’s landform has two side slopes. From the east to west the land slopes steeply from the Western Ghats to the Arabian sea, north to south from the laterite lands of Malabar to Thiruvananthapuram. 

The last mile connectivity from new stations to the settlements, highways, bus terminals, airports etc. would also create the need for a number of new roads, flyovers, parking lots etc. that would become the burden of local municipalities, apart from the added pollution load and social cost for the local people.

The total land in possession of the Indian Railways is 4.86 lakh hectares as on March 31, 2022 and 782 hectares are encroached upon and in 2022-23 (up till December 31). 

The Northeast frontier railway zone headquartered in Assam and spread in some districts of eastern Bihar and northern West Bengal, has the largest land holding at 48,357.51 hectares followed by Northern Railways (44,005.53 hectares) and Southeastern Railways (42,850.92 hectares).