ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses a few audit reports from comptroller and auditor general of India, the constitutional audit institution dealing with the land acquisition and resettlement processes. It examines the cases where land is acquired for industrial development and subsequently allotted by State-level Industrial Development Corporations (SIDCs). India’s supreme audit institute has made detailed comments on the bureaucratic deviations that constrain the safeguards available to landowners and undue favours that are granted by industrial development corporations to corporate entities. But there is a very little analysis of these audit findings by social scientists and public policy researchers. Hence this chapter will, first, review a few of the audit findings pertaining to West Bengal, Goa and Kerala. It also discusses at length the performance audits on land acquisition and rehabilitation policy in the case of Odisha. The reports published by the comptroller and auditor general of India on the process of land acquisition and implementation of resettlement and rehabilitation have revealed serious gaps at the level of governance, but this knowledge hasn’t so far entered the social action litigation literature. This chapter is written with a hope that anthropologists and public policy researchers would start looking at these audits reports, which should sharpen the academic discourse on internal displacement and rehabilitation. By reviewing audit findings, this chapter tries to engage with the gap that exists between the policy and its implementation.